OpenStack brings agility to the enterprise

In his keynote at the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong earlier this month, Jonathan Bryce, the director of the OpenStack Foundation, referenced a user poll identifying the top 10 environments within which OpenStack was being deployed. Not surprising was that the usage today is for web applications, agile development and DevOps.

What did not get coverage is how IBM is adopting OpenStack in the enterprise, bringing the same agility and flexibility of commodity cloud to enterprise systems. In October, IBM announced Power Virtualization Center (PowerVC) as the management center for PowerVM. Credit where credit is due, VMware has done a great job with vCenter, providing an easy-to-use, administrator-friendly approach to ESX virtualization management. PowerVC seeks to do the same for PowerVM and IBM Power Systems.

Built on the OpenStack Havana release, PowerVC uses the core Cinder, Nova and Neutron management components of OpenStack to manage the provisioning and configuration of LPARs, the creation and allocation of storage LUNs to LPARs and the assignment of IP addresses and VLANs. Initial storage support is for IBM Storwize V7000 and SAN Volume Controller (SVC), directly allocating LUNs to LPARs via NPIV. Support for Shared Storage Pools (SSP) and other storage devices with OpenStack Cinder device drivers are also in plan.

Power administrator productivity is greatly improved. Finally they can allocate LPARs with SAN attached storage in one go. The waiting for storage admins to map and assign LUNs to the dynamically created NPIV WWNs is eliminated. Even more impressive is the ability to manage LUN reassignment during Live Partition Migration (LPM) of LPARs from one system to another. Remapping LUNs from the source system to the target system as required and validating the configuration to ensure success of the live LPAR migration.

PowerVC 1.2 is available in December 2013. In the meantime, you can find more information on IBM Developer Works and a sneak preview on YouTube.

By: Steve Strutt

Link: http://www.smartercomputingblog.com/power-systems/openstack-enterprise-agility/