Recap: OpenStack Summit 2014 – Atlanta, GA

 
Cloud Computing, ,

This past week in Atlanta, I got the chance to attend the sessions, presented and exhibited at the OpenStack Summit.  The Summit was attended by over 4,500 registered participants.  Today there are more users than ever!  More than 200 companies have joined the project, and the main contributors of current OpenStack release are Red Hat, HP and IBM.  The OpenStack Foundation has posted a recap video showing some highlights:

 

 

Some themes emerged during the summit.  The new concept of big users becoming major contributors is really taking off.  Big users are becoming major contributors to the project because it means they can move faster as a company.  These big users include large banks, manufacturing, retailers, government agencies, entertainment and everything between.  Instead of spending time trying to convince vendors to add features, these large organizations have realized that they can work with the OpenStack community directly to add those features and move faster as a business as a result.


HP introduced the first enterprise-grade OpenStack distribution from HP Havana. HP plans to invest $1 billion of research and development into the Helion portfolio over the next two years and to provide OpenStack-based services in 20 data centers worldwide over the next 18 months. HP released a no-cost community edition of Helion OpenStack, which could be used for pilots and basic production duties.

 

Oracle has joined the OpenStack foundation as a corporate sponsor, and plans to integrate OpenStack capabilities into a broad set of Oracle products and cloud services.

 

Several key sessions focused around the best usage of overlay networks enabled by OpenStack.  VXLAN is the solution for many customers because of CPU utilization and overlay in hybrid cloud.

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Eli Karpilovski, Mellanox presents “VXLAN-The Future of networking in the Cloud”

 

We presented and demoed Mellanox’s value proposition for OpenStack Clouds showing best performance and enablement of VXLAN and VLAN over CloudX Openstack environment.  In our booth, we displayed a demo of a full solution running VXLAN with SDN controller.

 

We also presented a White paper of the PlumGrid VNI (Virtual Network Infrastructure) running over Mellanox switches and ConnectX-3 Pro adapters. The solution was running on top of RedHat OpenStack and targeted for large-scale data centers.

With the ConnectX-3 Pro stateless HW offload, users can achieve:

  • Linear improvement in VM performance until reaching the near line rate performance (36 Gbps with eight VM pairs generating traffic at maximum rates).
  • CPU utilization remains virtually constant on both TX and RX ends, while the throughput grows to 36 Gbps.

Efficient Virtualized Network (EVN):

  • Acceleration – RDMA (InfiniBand & RoCE) – Gain up to 5x performance improvement by using Cinder/iSER driver.
  • Virtualization – Software Defined Networks – Improve your Hypervisor performance and security by enabling eSwitch and SR-IOV technologies with Mellanox Neutron Plugin
  • Convergence – One wire for Storage, Compute and Networking

Mellanox plugins are part of the OpenStack Icehouse release, and Mellanox is the only adapter vendor supported by three (3) key OpenStack distributors:  Red Hat (RHOS), Canonical (Juju), and Mirantis (Fuel).

 

REFERENCES:

eli karpilovski
Author: Eli Karpilovski manages the Cloud Market Development at Mellanox Technologies. In addition, Mr. Karpilovski serves as the Cloud Advisory Council Chairman. Mr. Karpilovski served as product manager for the HCA Software division at Mellanox Technologies. Mr. Karpilovski holds a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from the Holon Institute of Technology and a Master of Business Administration from The Open University of Israel. Follow him on Twitter: @Elikarpilovski.

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