Brocade is proposing a Dynamic Network Resource Manager (DNRM) blueprint to simplify the deployment and management of physical and virtual networking resources within cloud infrastructures. The goal is to enable OpenStack cloud environments to more easily access pooled resources in multivendor networks. Brocade intends to present its proposal at next week’s OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong.
Highlights of the Brocade DNRM proposal include:
- Policy-based management of physical and virtual network resources from multiple vendors that will allow OpenStack Neutron to deliver operational efficiency and flexibility for Layers 3-7 of the network
- Four primary components — Supervisor, Interceptor, Plugins and Appliance Container — and several supporting elements, such as a management dashboard
- Support for emerging technologies, such as Network Functions Virtualization (NFV)
- Continued work with partners of the OpenStack community to deliver DNRM capabilities as part of the Spring 2014 OpenStack release, codenamed “IceHouse”
- A proof-of-concept implementation of DNRM that will be demonstrated at the OpenStack Summit
- Brocade is also updating several other OpenStack contributions in its continued drive toward open networking solutions.
Brocade also highlighted the Red Hat Certification of the Brocade VCS Fabric plugin as part of RHEL OpenStack distribution. The Brocade VCS plugin is part of the current OpenStack Havana release. With it, OpenStack now has a single logical interface to the entire Brocade Ethernet Fabric instead of interfacing with individual switches.
In addition, the company will support the next “IceHouse” release of OpenStack in Spring 2014 with Brocade SAN Fibre Channel, Brocade ADX Load Balancing as a Service (LBaaS) and an OpenStack solution with Brocade Vyatta vRouter plugins.
“Public and private clouds are evolving from basic, homogenous entities to rich, service-oriented clouds that combine best-of-breed solutions, including both physical and virtual resources. To ensure these next-generation cloud architectures properly serve customers, Brocade is continuing to expand its investment and participation in open projects such as OpenStack and OpenDaylight. It is our belief that contributions such as the Dynamic Network Resource Manager equip customers to build the next-generation services cloud to deliver the flexibility and agility it needs,” stated Ken Cheng, CTO and Vice President, Corporate Development and Emerging Business at Brocade.
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/neutron/+spec/dynamic-network-resource-mgmt
In October, the OpenStack community marked the eighth release of its open source software for building public, private, and hybrid clouds. OpenStack Havana introduces nearly 400 new features to support software development, managing data and running application infrastructure at scale. There were over 900 contributors to the Havana software release, a more than 70% increase from the Grizzly release six months ago. Two new projects, OpenStack Orchestration and Metering, were incubated during the Grizzly release cycle and are now available in the Havana release.
Some of the New Capabilities in OpenStack Havana:
- Application-Driven Capabilities – OpenStack Orchestration, now available as part of the Havana release, is a template-driven service for describing and automating the deployment of compute, storage and networking resources for an application. The new global clusters feature for Object Storage enables you to cut costs and improve performance by replicating and delivering data around the world, and the new QoS capability across Block Storage drivers allows you to guarantee performance requirements for an application. Docker support was also added to speed application deployment using containers.
- Improved Operational Experience – During this release cycle, significant effort went into increasing the breadth of functionality that is exposed through the Dashboard. A new team of user experience experts also contributed their time to improve the UI, workflows and productivity. OpenStack Metering, another new service in Havana, provides users with a single source of usage data across OpenStack services for activities like enterprise chargebacks and feeding systems monitoring tools.
- More Enterprise Features – OpenStack continues to mature and support enterprise-driven features such as end-to-end encryption across all Block Storage drivers, SSL support across all service APIs, new VPN and Firewall-as-a-Service capabilities, and support for rolling upgrades and boot from volume, which provides the foundation for live migration. Additionally, popular storage and networking providers continue to improve and write new plugins for OpenStack, making it easier for enterprises to work with their trusted vendors and take advantage of existing infrastructure.