Cloud

From Down Under – Doubling Down on OpenStack

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Dell is excited about OpenStack Summit happening in Sydney. As Australia is known as the “Land Down Under”, I’d like to provide a peek under the covers of our OpenStack strategy.

Since our last release and announcement of the Dell Ready Bundle for Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Dell has strengthened our OpenStack team to build scaled and hardened solutions for communications and cloud service providers. SP use-cases provide the right foundation to enable robust feature sets for large enterprise, higher education, and government workloads.

Our OpenStack strategy is built around integrating physical and virtual infrastructure into platforms best able to address the complex technical and operational challenges facing the SP industry. These include IaaS, CaaS, SaaS, NFV and the increasing role that containers, bare metal and cloud native technologies play. Today, there are four areas I would like to provide updates on:

  1. Dell NFV Ready Bundle for VMware with Integrated OpenStack
  2. Dell Ready Bundle for Red Hat OpenStack Platform
  3. Dell NFV Ready Bundle for Red Hat
  4. Update and Priorities for Dell OpenStack Solutions

Dell NFV Ready Bundle for VMware with Integrated OpenStack

In September, at MWC Americas, Dell announced the Dell NFV Ready Bundle for VMware. This solution extended Dell’s thought leadership and commitment to the Communications Service Provider (CSP) industry by enabling a fully-integrated platform of Dell infrastructure with VMware vCloud NFV.

Today, we have extended that platform to support VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) providing an option for SPs to capitalize on the accessibility of OpenStack by using the open APIs to integrate with VMware infrastructure. This carrier grade Ready Bundle provides a strong foundation for SPs to reduce time to service while offering multi-tenancy, dynamic scalability, high-availability, integrated containers support and In-Service-Software-Upgrade.

Dell Ready Bundle for Red Hat OpenStack Platform

At the same time, we’re announcing an update to the Dell Ready Bundle for Red Hat OpenStack Platform to enable support for the Dell PowerEdge 14th generation server family.

Release 10.1 of the Ready Bundle supports the PowerEdge R640 and R740xd rack servers and runs Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 and Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 software.  The PowerEdge 14th generation servers bring a scalable architecture, intelligent automation, and deeply integrated security, as well as increased performance and density for this Ready Bundle.

This release includes the Dell JetPack Automation Toolkit, which delivers rapid and reliable automated deployment and life-cycle management capabilities for OpenStack in less than half the time of current methods.

More information can be found at dell.com/openstack and all technical documentation, including the Architecture Guides, can be found in the Dell Tech Center community.

Dell NFV Ready Bundle for Red Hat

In addition to the standard platform, Dell introduces availability of our next Dell NFV Ready Bundle for Red Hat which is a pre-integrated and pre-validated joint Dell + Red Hat solution optimized to simplify and help CSPs accelerate production deployments of business critical virtualized network functions (VNF) and operationalization of NFV.

This NFV Ready Bundle provides enhancements on the core platform to include deployment of NFV-specific enhancements in an automated fashion with JetPack. Such enhancements include NUMA pinning, SR-IOV, DPDK support, and Huge Pages – all capabilities that Virtual Network Function (VNF) providers rely on for delivery of their network workloads.

Update and Priorities for Dell OpenStack Solutions

Going forward, Dell has created a single organization to develop both the strategy and the solutions for OpenStack across our partners. As a result, we are better able to serve our customers and our partners (VMware, Red Hat, Canonical, SuSE and Mirantis) and markets. As an example, this team just delivered the Dell Canonical Mitaka OpenStack Reference Architectures for PowerEdge and DSS 9000 rack scale infrastructure. Our core objective is to deliver a simplified and converged platform, continue investment in JetPack as a common automation layer, expanding the networking options available to include SDN, 25 Gigabit networking integrated with Dell Open Networking, and create a comprehensive infrastructure assurance suite across the entire stack.

Dell is committed to OpenStack as a platform for multiple workloads, and will continue to invest to bring industry-leading OpenStack solutions that address our customers’ challenges to market. Be sure to visit Dell at OpenStack Summit (Dev & Ops Lounge sponsored by Dell on Level 4) and join many of the speaking engagements in which Dell is participating:

Baremetal Server Management – Like Shooting Redfish in a Barrel 

Automated NFV Deployment and Management with TripleO

Fast and secure Clear Containers on OpenStack. A winner! 

What’s Your Workflow?

About the Author: Kevin Shatzkamer

Kevin Shatzkamer is Vice President and General Manager, Service Provider Strategy and Solutions at Dell Technologies with responsibility for strategy and architectural evolution of the intersection points of network infrastructure technologies, cloud and virtualization platforms, and software programmability. His organizational responsibility encompasses industry strategy and investment analysis, business development and go-to-market activities, technical architecture and engineering, and infrastructure evolution / futures-planning. He is also responsible for leading the Dell Technologies 5G strategy in close collaboration with industry-leading telecommunications providers globally. Mr. Shatzkamer represents Dell Technologies on the World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Futures Council on New Network Technologies (5G-related). Mr. Shatzkamer's ecosystem-wide, experience-centric approach to working with customers allows for the identification and exploitation of synergies between disparate organizations to derive new technology / business models for the mobile industry, especially as “5G” defines transformation from technical architecture to ecosystem and service offerings. With over 20 years of industry experience, Mr. Shatzkamer joined Dell EMC in 2016, with prior experience at Brocade (Service Provider CTO, Head of Brocade Labs) and Cisco (Distinguished Systems Engineer). He holds more than 50 patents related to all areas of work. He received a Bachelor’s of Science from the University of Florida, a Master’s of Business Administration from Indiana University, and a Master’s of System Design and Management from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr. Shatzkamer is a regular speaker at industry forums and has published two books discussing the architectures and technologies shaping the future of the Mobile Internet (2G, 3G, and 4G networks), from RAN to services.