OpenStack Unveils Third Community-Driven Software Release

Focusing on stability and reliability for larger-scale cloud deployments, OpenStack has announced the third community-driven software release across three projects -- OpenStack Compute, Object Storage and the new Image Service.

OpenStack Object Storage (code-named Swift (News - Alert)) is open source software for creating redundant, scalable object storage. OpenStack Image Service (code-named Glance) provides discovery, registration, and delivery services for virtual disk images.

Apart from providing newer OpenStack Image Service, the Cactus release extends across the previously available OpenStack Compute and Object Storage. For virtual disk images, the OpenStack Image Service (code-name Glance) works as a discovery, public registration, and delivery service. Apart from offering a new command line tool for a better user experience, it now features security enhancements including image verification.

“As a strong supporter of OpenStack, we believe that cloud consumers should have choice,” said Ewan Mellor, director, OpenStack Engineering, Datacenter and Cloud Division, Citrix and elected member of the OpenStack Project Policy Board. “We added support for VMware vSphere to allow enterprises and services providers deploying OpenStack the flexibility to integrate with legacy technologies and take control of their cloud strategy.”

Features provided in the OpenStack Compute (code-name Nova) include New OpenStack API 1.1 with support for extensions, which allows developers to innovate more quickly by adding extensions to their local OpenStack installations ahead of the code being accepted by the OpenStack community as a whole; Support for enterprise storage solutions, including Solaris iSCSI and HP SAN; Support for major virtualization technologies, including Microsoft (News - Alert) Hyper-V, KVM, LXC, QEMU, UML, VMware vSphere, Xen and Citrix XenServer; and so on.

Recently, Cloudscaling recently announced the launch of its fourth large-scale deployment in nine months and the first commercial deployment of the OpenStack Swift object storage architecture outside of Rackspace. Cloudscaling provided architecture, engineering and hardware specification support on the project for one of its Tier 1 ISP clients. The new object storage cloud provides virtually unlimited, petabyte-scale storage along with rapid and automated scaling that can serve several thousand new users.