Hewlett Packard Enterprise has announced HPE Helion OpenStack 4.0 at OpenStack Summit Barcelona 2016.
HPE Helion OpenStack is an open and flexible infrastructure-as-a service (IaaS) suited for enterprise workloads across a variety of vertical industries and enabling communications service providers (CSPs) to deploy network functions virtualisation (NFV) applications.
HPE Helion OpenStack 4.0 is based on OpenStack Mitaka and builds on top of HPE Helion OpenStack 3.0’s expanded configurability and deployment options, tighter administrative controls and improved scalability, while staying close to OpenStack trunk code. HPE Helion OpenStack 4.0 contains improvements in the areas of ecosystem integration, operations, security, scalability and application performance designed to help organisations deploy and manage new cloud technologies into their existing datacentre, while maximising operational efficiency. New features and functionality include:
- Extensive ecosystem integration – the addition of out-of-the box integration with the HPE Distributed Cloud Networking software defined networking (SDN) solution, as well as certified support and lifecycle management of third party network services, such as F5 Networks load balancers and leading SDN alternatives, including VMware NSX-v and Midokura MidoNet, providing customers with increased options when formulating their networking strategy
- Improved operations management – enhanced capacity reporting provides operators with visibility into how much compute and storage capacity is available, how much has been allocated and how much is being utilised to help “right size” cloud resources
- Increased security – enhanced access controls provide new logging, auditing and monitoring features, reducing the attack surface of backend traffic
- Increased scalability and application performance – new virtual machine (VM) auto-scaling provides a policy-driven way to quickly add or remove resources to an application to handle spikes in demand and auto scale them back down; new native support for accelerated network interface controller cards from Intel and new data plane development kit (DPDK) support for high-performance data transfers between tenant VMs
“OpenStack technology has become mainstream, but it can still be complex for the uninitiated,” said Raj Thakur, vice president and general manager, Hybrid IT, Asia Pacific and Japan, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “HPE Helion OpenStack 4.0 gives organisations the tools and support they need to build new and update existing applications, without requiring IT’s direct involvement. We call it ‘more dev, less ops.’”
Additionally, HPE announced general availability of HPE Helion Stackato 4.0, a cloud application platform providing developers with a container-based solution that includes a certified Cloud Foundry service, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflow and extensibility to connect to new and existing application services.
Production-ready open source platform for the telco cloud
With customers’ expectations of high performance and “always on” availability, CSPs require near wire speed throughput, low latency, fast fault recovery and five-nines availability. HPE Helion OpenStack 4.0 helps CSPs accelerate their transformation from networks built on monolithic, proprietary appliances to more-agile cloud-based networks enabled by NFV, while providing the high availability, reliability and performance they need.
HPE Helion OpenStack 4.0 provides CSPs with an open source-based cloud virtual infrastructure manager that meets their demanding performance and reliability requirements providing CSPs with the latest OpenStack advancements, including:
- Increased performance – accelerated virtual switching helps ensure near line-rate performance, low latency and high throughput using DPDK support
- Open source flexibility – open, standard APIs provide the most up-to-date, feature rich release, reduce integration overhead costs and provide virtual network function application portability, helping CSPs avoid vendor dependency; built-in support for a wide variety of guest operating systems (e.g., major variants of Linux and Windows), compute options (e.g., KVM and VMware ESXi) and SDN (e.g., the new OpenDaylight based HPE OpenSDN Platform and HPE Distributed Cloud Networking) offers CSPs freedom of choice
- Broad partner ecosystem – nearly 50 pre-tested virtual network function solutions from HPE OpenNFV partners have been verified on HPE Helion OpenStack, helping CSPs to choose solutions that meet unique requirements and quickly launch them more easily and cost effectively
- Simplified deployment and management – integrated with HPE NFV System, a pre-integrated hardware and software bundle optimised for NFV workloads, and HPE operations support system/business support system (OSS/BSS) and management and orchestration (MANO) solutions, providing seamless integration into existing CSP networks
“NFV has proven to be a killer use case for OpenStack,” said Thomas Sennhauser, Chief Technology Officer, Enterprise Group, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “With HPE Helion OpenStack 4.0 as a foundation, carriers can count on always-on availability, reliability and performance for their cloud based networks, along with the freedom of choice open source provides, helping avoid vendor lock-in.”
About Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is an industry leading technology company that enables customers to go further, faster. With the industry’s most comprehensive portfolio, spanning the cloud to the data centre to workplace applications, our technology and services help customers around the world make IT more efficient, more productive and more secure.
