OpenStack Summit: HP, Canonical Ubuntu Flex Cloud Muscle

Gillai joined HP through the 3Com acquisition. The key message: Watch HP’s software-defined networking (SDN) strategy for cloud computing and OpenStack. 

HP has 200 people at the conference; many of those folks are OpenStack code contributors.

HP has a history in the open source market — remember that HP indemnified Linux against SCO legal threats, Gillai noted.

HP now ships one Linux server per minute — the fastest sales rate of any PC maker in the world.

The next move was OpenStack: “We zeroed in on OpenStack because — with the right support and the right community — it could become the Linux of cloud.”

HP is pumping its chest just a bit about the company’s OpenStack public cloud bet. (But it’s important to note that IBM and Dell have made similar bets, Talkin’ Cloud notes.)

HP helped to write the OpenStack Foundation charter to make sure the platform grow in an open manner.

HP is the 4th largest contributor to Grizzly, the latest OpenStack release.

More takeaways coming shortly.

Akers described how HP is one of the leading players helping to “harden” OpenStack for secure, scalable deployments.

Big focus areas: HP is promoting DNS as a service, relational database as a service, 

Lots of talk about bare metal clouds. Talkin’ Cloud is meeting with HP later today and we’ll be sure to ask for more thoughts on this.

Here comes the product pitch: HP CloudSystem 7.2 — a pre-integrated cloud platform used by 1,000 customers. It includes server, storage, networking and software. Version 7.2 has OpenStack on it. A big opportunity involves private cloud bursting into into public clouds. Also, there’s OpenStack support for Nova, Keystone and Glance. 

HP bet the cloud business on OpenStack two years ago, and continues to celebrate that bet.

His opening line: “OpenStack: My how you’ve grown.”

Ubuntu’s core experience includes OpenStack in the telecom market. “It’s a serious infrastructure play.”

AT&T, T-mobile, NTT, and China Mobile are running OpenStack and Ubuntu with Canonical.

In the cloud, the application world is shifting from scale up (Oracle) to scale out (Hadoop).

People are choosing Ubuntu because of scale — including economics, tools and the ecosystem, he asserted.

Shuttleworth is pitching Landscape — Canonical’s Ubuntu management tool — as a management platform for OpenStack clouds.

His comments include a live demo — showing Landscape rolling an OpenStack kernel update through the cloud without taking down the workload. 

Dell and HP now certify all of their volume server SKUs for Ubuntu. “Our goal is to be the easiest, fastest way to deploy OpenStack.”

Canonical continues to support KVM and Xen hypervisors, and yesterday announced a relationship with VMware — a critical addition for enterprises running the vSphere hypervisor.

Ubuntu is the No. 1 Linux platform on Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud. In May, Ubuntu will have a full set of drivers for running Windows on Ubuntu on OpenStack.

Ubuntu is the No. 1 public guest across public clouds, he asserted.

“One Last Thing” — Shuttleworth pulled a Steve Jobs and shifted the conversation to his smart phone, which is running a “full blown” version of Ubuntu rather than a scaled down release.

Stay tuned for more live updates.