Cisco has released a free distribution of the OpenStack, open-source cloud platform.
The Cisco Edition of OpenStack was announced Saturday in a Cisco blog and comes as the OpenStack Design Summit meets this week in San Diego.
In its OpenStack release, Cisco is emphasizing the services it will provide along with Folsom, the latest version of OpenStack software.
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The software includes virtual networking developed through the OpenStack Quantum project, which gives users the ability to programmatically provision and operate their cloud network infrastructure.
Cisco was an early member of OpenStack and participated in the Quantum project, along with Nicira, a virtual networking startup that was purchased in July for $1.2 billion by VMware.
Lew Tucker, Cisco's vice president and CTO of cloud computing who is also vice chairman of the OpenStack Foundation, said Monday that the Cisco Edition of OpenStack lets customers install and operate OpenStack in production along with installation guides and reference architectures.
Cisco is also adding open-source components for high availability, automation and monitoring of operations, Tucker said.
"We’ve been working on deploying OpenStack with customers moving into production," Tucker said in an email to CRN.
"Two notable efforts include working with our own Cisco WebEx cloud platform where OpenStack will be used as the platform for rolling out new services, and Comcast, with whom we’ve been actively engaged in a collaboration around using OpenStack too that will allow Comcast to rapidly develop and deploy new services," Tucker added.
The company said that users do not need to run the Cisco Edition of OpenStack on Cisco hardware, although the Cisco Edition is validated on Cisco’s hardware configuration.
PUBLISHED OCT. 15, 2012
