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Dell and SUSE team up to promote OpenStack

The use of OpenStack often turns into a computer science project. Many in the industry, including Dell and SUSE, are working to create an easy to deploy and use product based upon OpenStack. Dell and SUSE just announced that they are teaming up to bring OpenStack to customers.
Written by Dan Kusnetzky, Contributor

While visiting the display area at Dell's Dell World bash, I made a point to stop by the booths of Kusnetzky Group clients and prospects. One of them was SUSE.

The SUSE representatives and I enjoyed a lively conversation about open source, Linux and the impact they were having on cloud computing infrastructure. The topic of SUSE's commitment to OpenStack came up. The next thing I knew I was scheduled to meet with representatives of both Dell and SUSE to discuss an upcoming announcement the two companies had planned for the next day.

Once we found one another and walked to a quiet area off of the show floor, we reviewed how both companies had been working separately to take OpenStack from being a computer science project that required users to do a great deal of integration work to a product that was easily installed and used. It turns out that both companies were working on similar things, learned about one another's projects and decided to work together rather than doing the same things separately.

Here's a snippet from their joint announcement:

What Dell and SUSE have to say about their partnership

SUSE®, a pioneer in open source software, today announced at Dell World it was selected to join Dell’s Emerging Solutions Ecosystem as an open source cloud solution provider. The ecosystem drives collaborative innovation by providing a single point of contact to complementary, best-of-breed hardware, software and services in emerging technology areas such as open source cloud and big data. Customers will be able to purchase SUSE Cloud, an automated cloud computing platform, directly from Dell to accelerate cloud computing deployments in order to respond and adapt to constantly changing customer demands and capitalize immediately on new market opportunities.

Launched in August 2012, SUSE Cloud is the first enterprise-ready, private cloud solution to help customers improve resource utilization and speed the delivery of IT services across a secure, compliant and fully supported cloud environment. SUSE Cloud combines the power of the OpenStack project and the flexibility of the Dell Crowbar project with SUSE engineering excellence and support. The result simplifies deployment and ongoing administration of the physical cloud infrastructure so customers have maximum flexibility to configure their clouds to meet specific needs.

SUSE is helping its customers build future-proof private clouds by working closely with open source projects and partners who are committed to the open source vision for OpenStack. Currently, SUSE has in place technical collaboration and/or support agreements with members of Dell’s Emerging Solutions Ecosystem including Dell, OpenStack Foundation, Crowbar Project, Mirantis, Inktank and Ceph.

Hands-on training events, hosted at Dell Solution Centers, are available to help customers fully understand how to build an OpenStack-based private cloud using Dell PowerEdge C servers and SUSE Cloud. The events are free to qualified SUSE or Dell customers and take place on January 16, 2013, in Chicago, IL, and on January 23, 2013, in Santa Clara, CA. Visit  http://bit.ly/QtrvAx to learn more.

Snapshot Analysis

When speaking with Kusnetzky Group clients, I often learn of in-house projects to transform IT's infrastructure to create private clouds. The hope is to make maximum use of the organization's industry standard (read X86-based) infrastructure and help the organization be much more agile going forward. Those who have use Amazon's AWS speak about Eucalyptus projects. Nearly everyone else speaks about OpenStack projects that are underway.

Quite often I learn that fact that OpenStack is really a number of independent projects that are designed for maximum flexibility rather than ease of integration and use usually means that those planning to use OpenStack are also embarking on an exciting computer science project. Most wish it wasn't so.

It appears that Dell, SUSE and many others have heard customers and are doing their best to offer products that are based upon OpenStack and have been integrated, documented and are offered with support services. This joint Dell/SUSE announcement shows just how far these two companies have gone to turn OpenStack into an easy to deploy and manage software stack.

I was impressed with the enthusiasm displayed both for the OpenStack project and for working with one another to help mutual clients be more successful with their private cloud projects. If you take the time to examine what the companies are doing today and their plans for the future, I'm sure you will be impressed too.

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