Ubuntu 13.04 ‘Raring Ringtail’ Includes HA for OpenStack

Canonical
Ltd. announced that Ubuntu
Server 13.04 is available for download, featuring HA for
OpenStack along with 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 a
distribution of OpenStack that makes HA a standard feature,
underlining its position as a fast 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.

Customers will be able to take
advantage of collaboration between Canonical and VMware to enable
organizations to link OpenStack clouds to VMware technologies,
including vSphere and Nicira NVP. Both companies 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
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 easier to deploy and
manage workloads. The collection of open source workloads – or Juju
‘Charms’ – has grown, giving dev access to over 130 curated
charms for common cloud workloads.

The collection of charms includes all
major web development frameworks, including Node.js, Django, and Ruby
on Rails, enabling orchestration of web applications using any of
these frameworks on EC2 and OpenStack clouds. This delivers a 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.

CIO, CTO and Developer Resources
Canonical’s landscape management tool
has OpenStack awareness built-in, and supports workflows for
production cloud environments, such as live updating of host kernels
and other components in a running cloud. For service providers and
cloud deployments, the ability to monitor, manage and automate cloud
operations is a 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 provides an integrated and
supported implementation of Ceph alongside SWIFT for customers
wanting sophisticated storage options. Canonical customers 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:
Ubuntu 13.04 is available for public
download.