Canonical and Cavium Expand SoC Partnership for Ubuntu, OpenStack

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, is strengthening its ties to system-on-a-chip (SoC) manufacturer Cavium through expanded support for the ThunderX family, which could open new doors for Ubuntu and open source on ARM64 devices, OpenStack cloud servers and other enterprise hardware.

Ubuntu 13.10, which was released in October 2013 and is the second most-recent version of the open source operating system, supported ThunderX products, but Canonical will now expand support to include Ubuntu 14.04. That's especially important for enterprises customers, since 14.04 is a long-term support (LTS) release and therefore much more practical for production environments.

Cavium is touting the deployment and provisioning tools that Canonical has built for Ubuntu, including Juju and MAAS, as a major part of the reason for the expansion of the partnership between the two companies. In addition, Cavium points out that "Ubuntu is the first commercial-grade platform for ARM64 computing," setting it apart from other operating systems.

And last but not least, Ubuntu's strength in the OpenStack market—where Ubuntu leads as the most popular operating system for OpenStack deployments—is another reason for Cavium's interest in the platform.

In sum, Cavium said in a statement, "We believe the ThunderX SoC family will deliver an optimal combination of compute, storage, networking and security integration for the scale-out cloud and cloud-specific workloads. Canonical has demonstrated industry leadership in the cloud market and is the most widely used OpenStack distribution with its investment in OpenStack development and deployment. With today’s announcement Canonical will be partnering with Cavium to optimise OpenStack for the ThunderX SoC family."

The expanded partnership is good news for Canonical, which is in an increasingly strong position in the cloud computing and data center markets. And it's another reminder that Ubuntu is now about much, much more than the open source desktop computing solutions that defined Canonical's early days.