OpenStack Launches 'Essex'

According to a recent announcement made by OpenStack, the company has launched “Essex”, the fifth version of its community-driven software that provides self-managed compute, storage and networking resources to build efficient, automated private and public cloud infrastructures.

“Essex” comes with the OpenStack Dashboard that allows cloud administrators to create and manage projects and users, defining resources available to them. Users can simultaneously launch and manage multiple compute instances, as well as storage and networking resources in the OpenStack Dashboard. Users can launch and customize instances in the OpenStack Dashboard within the limits their administrators have set.

“We have observed the Open Source (News - Alert) model and Linux change the IT world by growing a community of individuals and companies building successful businesses on top of Open Source projects. These have facilitated the maturing of the technology and the creation of vibrant ecosystems. OpenStack is now going through this cycle -- just much faster with all the experience on how to run successful Open Source projects and the industry coming aboard much more quickly than with Linux,” said Phil Zamani, SVP of the Digital Business Unit Cloud Services at Deutsche Telekom (News - Alert), in a statement.

He added, “Essex is a very important milestone, as it marks a point where OpenStack has become complete and mature enough to be a solid foundation for large-scale projects on top of it. This will grow the momentum of OpenStack in the market. We will base the rollout of our Business Marketplace SaaS (News - Alert) Cloud program on Essex.”

The new “Essex” comes with significant new features to improve compliance and data security with the ability to expire objects according to document retention policies, more protections against corruption and degradation of data, and sophisticated disaster recovery improvements. The solution also carries new capabilities important to service providers including the ability to upload data directly from an authenticated web page and the ability to restrict the maximum number of containers per account.

“OpenStack Essex sets the pace for open source cloud infrastructure, and we're delighted to include it in Ubuntu (News - Alert) 12.04 LTS. The combination makes a robust platform for utility computing with tremendous momentum among early adopters and large scale deployments,” said Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu founder and VP of Product Strategy at Canonical. “OpenStack and Ubuntu are the key ingredients in multiple new public clouds. To accelerate the deployment of private and public clouds, we have made significant joint investments in deployment, tooling and automated testing in this release, making it easier to deploy, scale and manage clouds with the latest OpenStack on the latest enterprise release of Ubuntu.”