Crowbar Provides the Right Leverage for SUSE Cloud

You can also read this post on the Dell Tech Center Blog.

A couple of weeks ago I announced our SUSE Cloud private beta program, which is the next step in creating the industry’s first enterprise-ready private cloud infrastructure solution built on OpenStack and SUSE technologies. As promised then, here’s some more insight into SUSE’s newest offering.

We understand “the cloud” isn’t a simple, stand-alone system wrapped up in a neat little box. Private cloud solutions are made up of multiple parts which, at times, can be complex to pull together, install and manage. To streamline and simplify installation, a simple to use but robust provisioning framework is needed. After evaluating our options for this important aspect of SUSE Cloud, we chose to go with Crowbar, an open source software framework developed by Dell. Crowbar is a fresh approach to cloud tooling and its practical and accessible model is attracting a great cross-industry community we’re excited to join and engage with.

In collaboration with the Dell team, we’ve integrated Crowbar into our existing tooling to deliver a very streamlined enterprise user experience for the deployment of SUSE Cloud. We are now pushing our contributions back upstream and working with the Crowbar project team to make them part of the core code base so others can leverage the joint Dell/SUSE results.

“SUSE Cloud on OpenStack with Dell Crowbar” might be a bit much for a product name, so forgive us if we don’t use it in our marketing materials as such, but it does make for a pretty compelling cloud offering. And as strongly as we believe in OpenStack, we also see Crowbar as technology critical to enabling enterprise-class cloud infrastructure deployment.

I again encourage you to start building an interoperable, manageable and open-standards based cloud. Contact us to join the beta program by sending an email to cloud@suse.com.

And for more on SUSE and Dell Crowbar, see the blog post by Rob Hirschfeld, Senior Cloud Solutions Architect at Dell.