Grizzly Release Positions OpenStack at Center of Cloud Innovation

Global contributors grow 56 percent in six months, delivering the broadest support for Software-Defined Networking and enterprise technologies

AUSTIN, Texas, April 4th, 2013 – OpenStack® Grizzly, the seventh release of the open source software for building public, private, and hybrid clouds, has nearly 230 new features to support production operations at scale and greater integration with enterprise technologies, including broad Software-Defined Networking support. With more organizations running OpenStack in production, the Grizzly development cycle focused on supporting practical use cases for deployers and operators, including Best Buy, Comcast, CERN, HP, NeCTAR, NSA, Rackspace, Samsung SDS and others who will all be speaking at the OpenStack Summit, April 15-18, in Portland, OR.

"With OpenStack, we have been able to launch a stable infrastructure service to support our agile development teams," said Reinhardt Quelle, operations architect, Cisco WebEx. "Instead of waiting weeks for deployments, the devops teams who have adopted the platform are deploying multiple times a day, and the pace of product innovation that enables will be critical to our success. OpenStack's modularity and extensibility has enabled us to adapt the service to our specific problems."

The OpenStack community continues to attract the best developers and experts in their disciplines with more than 517 contributors merging 7,620 patches in the Grizzly release. To continually improve software quality and upgradability as new features are added, significant effort was put into the core infrastructure including comprehensive testing paths and upgrade testing on every commit. More than 45 companies employed developers who contributed to this release, including Red Hat, Rackspace, IBM, HP, Nebula, Intel, eNovance, Canonical, VMware, Cloudscaling, DreamHost and SINA.

"We've been using OpenStack to provide cloud computing to Australian researchers for more than a year. Currently we have 7,000 cores in-rack, but expect to have 30,000 cores spread across eight locations in an area as large as the USA by the end of 2013," said Tom Fifield, Cloud Architect, NeCTAR. "Through the past two years, we've witnessed enormous development progress of the OpenStack platform, such as OpenStack Compute Cells, a new feature in Grizzly that allows us to split our deployment across multiple datacentres while retaining a single API endpoint."

New Features and Capabilities in OpenStack Grizzly

Contributors added nearly 230 new features across compute, storage, networking and shared services in the cloud platform.

• OpenStack Compute – Compute delivers improved production operations at greater scale, with "Cells" to manage distributed clusters and the "NoDB" host architecture to reduce reliance on a central database. Improvements in virtualization management deliver new features and greater support for multiple hypervisors, including ESX, KVM, Xen and Hyper-V. Additional functionality was added for bare metal provisioning, shared storage protocols and online networking features such as the ability to hot add/remove network devices.
• OpenStack Object Storage – Cloud operators can now take advantage of quotas to automatically control the growth of their object storage environments. Additionally, the ability to perform bulk operations makes it easier to deploy and manage large clusters and provides an improved experience for end users. Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) enables browser connections directly to the back-end storage environment, improving the performance and scalability of web-integrated object storage clusters.
• OpenStack Block Storage – The second full release of OpenStack Block Storage delivers a full storage service for managing heterogeneous storage environments from a centralized access point. A new intelligent scheduler allows cloud end users to allocate storage based on the workload, whether they are looking for performance, efficiency, or cost effectiveness. The community also added drivers for a diverse selection of backend storage devices, including Ceph/RBD, Coraid, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Huawei, IBM, NetApp, Red Hat/Gluster, SolidFire and Zadara.
• OpenStack Networking – The leading network-as-a-service platform enables advanced network automation, allowing users to control their networking technology of choice. Those choices grew tremendously with the Grizzly release, with the addition of support for Big Switch, Hyper-V, PlumGrid, Brocade and Midonet to complement the existing support for Open vSwitch, Cisco UCS/Nexus, Linux Bridge, Nicira, Ryu OpenFlow, and NEC OpenFlow. OpenStack Networking achieves greater scale and higher availability by distributing L3/L4 and dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) services across multiple servers. A new load-balancing-as-a-service (LBaaS) framework and API lays the groundwork for further innovation from the broad base of networking companies already integrating with OpenStack.
• OpenStack Dashboard – OpenStack Dashboard brings an improved user experience, greater multilingual support, and exposes new features across OpenStack clouds, like Networking and LBaaS. The Grizzly Dashboard is also backwards compatible with the Folsom release, allowing users to take advantage of additional features in their Folsom cloud prior to a full upgrade to the latest version.
• OpenStack Identity – A new token format based on standard PKI functionality provides major performance improvements and allows offline token authentication by clients without requiring additional Identity service calls. OpenStack Identity also delivers more organized management of multi-tenant environments with support for groups, impersonation, role-based access controls (RBAC), and greater capability to delegate administrative tasks. OpenStack Image Service – There were major advancements in image sharing between cloud end users, and the creation of a set of common properties on images to provide more discoverable images and better performance when retrieving images.

"The Grizzly release is a clear indication of the maturity of the OpenStack software development process, as contributors continue to produce a stable, scalable and feature-rich platform for building public, private and hybrid clouds," said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. "The community delivered another packed release on schedule, attracting contributions from some of the brightest technologists across virtualization, storage, networking, security, and systems engineering. They are not only solving the complex problems of cloud, but driving the entire technology industry forward."

Following the Grizzly release, the community will gather at the OpenStack Summit to plan the roadmap for the Havana release, coming October 2013. Two new projects that were incubated in Grizzly will be integrated with the Havana release: Ceilometer, a centralized source for metering and monitoring data, and Heat, a template-based orchestration layer for OpenStack.

OpenStack Summit April 2013

The OpenStack Summit taking place April 15-18, in Portland, OR, brings together experienced open source developers, business leaders and users in one venue. The OpenStack Summit is the premier open cloud event of the year with over 2,000 delegates expected to share case studies and best practices, cover topics of strategic interest for open communities, and determine the roadmap for the next release. Headline sponsors include HP, Rackspace, Ubuntu and Red Hat and the event will feature presentations from OpenStack users including Best Buy, Comcast, CERN, HP, NeCTAR, NSA, Rackspace and Samsung SDS.

About OpenStack®

OpenStack is open source software for building public and private clouds.

OpenStack powers some of the most widely-used SaaS applications and eCommerce sites, the world’s largest public clouds, and Global 1000 enterprises alike, each of whom rely on OpenStack to run their businesses every day. The open source cloud platform controls pools of compute, storage and networking resources at massive scale, making them available via a self-service dashboard.

OpenStack is backed by an independent Foundation and global community with more than 8,800 members representing 850 unique organizations across 114 countries. To get started with the software or join the community, visit www.OpenStack.org.