Ubuntu 13.04 delivers OpenStack with high availability, scalable storage and big data deployment capabilities

Ubuntu 13.04 offers a complete solution for building highly available, flexible and secure OpenStack production clouds with scale out storage, networking and compute capabilities.

Canonical today announced that Ubuntu Server 13.04 is available for download, featuring high-availability (HA) for OpenStack along with industry-leading capabilities for scale out storage, networking and compute.

“Ubuntu is built for hyperscale and is the platform of choice for production OpenStack clouds” commented Jane Silber, CEO at Canonical. “Over the last year, we’ve seen a clear shift in major enterprises, telcos and service providers, towards building their public and private cloud offerings on Ubuntu plus OpenStack.”

Ubuntu Server 13.04 is the only distribution of OpenStack that makes high-availability (HA) a standard feature, underlining its position as the easiest and fastest way to deploy an OpenStack cloud for production purposes. Enterprises on 12.04 LTS can upgrade to the latest OpenStack version, Grizzly, from the Ubuntu Cloud Archive.

Canonical’s customers will also be able to take advantage of collaboration between Canonical and VMware to enable organizations to link OpenStack clouds to VMware technologies, including VMware vSphere® and Nicira NVP. Canonical and VMware will support such deployments on Ubuntu, simplifying the lives of administrators with existing VMware ESX real estate who are interested in OpenStack for cloud infrastructure.

This release of Ubuntu brings substantial enhancements to the Juju orchestration GUI that provides a visual representation of the relationships between services running on clouds like Amazon EC2 or OpenStack, making it even easier to deploy and manage workloads. The collection of open source workloads – or Juju Charms – has grown, giving devops access to over 130 curated charms for common cloud workloads.

The collection of charms now includes all major web development frameworks including Node.js, Django, and Ruby on Rails, enabling rapid orchestration of web applications using any of these frameworks on EC2 and OpenStack clouds. This delivers a flexible PaaS experience and freedom to choose the cloud that best meets enterprise needs. Charms are also available for the databases that underpin web applications, including MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Cassandra, allowing a developer to select the best tools to build their application and reducing the risk of being tied to a prescribed, vendor-specific framework.

Canonical’s Landscape management tool now has OpenStack awareness built-in, and supports critical workflows for production cloud environments, such as live updating of host kernels and other components in a running cloud. For service providers and mission-critical cloud deployments, the ability to monitor, manage and automate cloud operations is an extremely valuable capability that is unique to Ubuntu.

Scale-out storage is a popular topic with enterprises that manage massive and growing volumes of data. A new generation of scale-out storage services like SWIFT and Ceph enable companies to turn cheap, directly-attached storage into network services for block (network disk) and object (S3-style) storage. Ubuntu 13.04 now provides a fully integrated and supported implementation of Ceph alongside SWIFT for customers wanting sophisticated and cost effective storage options. Canonical customers now benefit from a support agreement between Canonical and Inktank, the company behind Ceph, that provides a single escalation support route for issues related to Ceph on Ubuntu.

Availability and more information:

• Ubuntu 13.04 is available globally for public download from April 25th 2013 BST. To download Ubuntu 13.04, visit: www.ubuntu.com/download
• Access the Charm store: http://jujucharms.com/charms
• OpenStack release notes: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/ReleaseNotes/Grizzly