Canonical Delivers Openstack Cloud On IBM Iron For Canadian University

Canonical has delivered what it is calling a “Campus Research Cloud” that provides an automated computing solution for a leading Canadian university.

The company behind the open source Ubuntu operating system said that the research cloud at Carleton University runs on IBM Power servers, and provides a “central location for researchers on campus to support cutting-edge projects, develop new applications and access commercial software”.

Research Cloud

It seems that Carleton University required a cloud environment on a hybrid platform that ideally included both IBM Power and x86 based servers. The university felt they needed one pure OpenStack environment which could provide self-service support with unified cloud management.

Canonical offered the university OpenStack, in addition to Ubuntu, MAAS, and Juju for the Power platform.

It worked with IBM and bundled in a number of its tools and software including Ubuntu, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with OpenStack Liberty, MaaS (Metal-as-a-Service provisioning construct created by Canonical) and Juju, in order to create a single Ubuntu OpenStack deployment on IBM Power Systems and x86 servers in a hybrid cloud.

The university was able to quickly deploy all OpenStack services across Power8 and x86 based servers thanks to the use of Juju, a modelling tool that allows for the rapid configuration and deployment of clouds.

“We really could not have gotten these results without Canonical,” said Sylvain Pitre Ph.D, Manager, Research Computing Services at Carleton University. “Using Juju and MAAS to deploy OpenStack on bare metal IBM Power and x86 based servers, we are now able to service the entire research population and ensure they have seamless access to Power for the high performing compute capacity they need for rapid analysis of their most complex challenges.”

It should be remembered that IBM and Canonical have a long standing relationship. In 2010 for example, Canonical put the free version of IBM’s DB2 database system onto its Ubuntu Linux-based cloud service, for both private and public clouds.

And earlier this year Ubuntu and Ubuntu OpenStack was made available on Power-based servers.

Popular Option

“We are very excited to be working with Canonical and to have Ubuntu OpenStack as the first OpenStack available on Power,” said Stefanie Chiras, IBM VP for IBM Power Systems.

“Carleton University has created an innovative and automated solution with its new research campus cloud,” said Anand Krishnan, EVP at Canonical Cloud. “Canonical’s tools; MaaS and Juju enable model driven operations to become a reality, reducing complexity and risk to customers. Our special relationship with IBM creates a powerful ecosystem of infrastructure, software and tools which provide customers an automated and cost effective approach to cloud building.”

OpenStack has previously faced tough questions surrounding its complexity and what kinds of workloads could be best suited to the open source cloud platform.

But there is no escaping the fact that OpenStack negates vendor lock in, unlike rivals like Microsoft or Amazon Web Services, and is proving to be an increasingly popular solution.

What do you know about Linux? Take our quiz!

Tom Jowitt

Tom Jowitt is a leading British tech freelancer and long standing contributor to Silicon UK. He is also a bit of a Lord of the Rings nut...

Recent Posts

Amazon Mulls New Multi-Billion Dollar Investment In Anthropic – Report

Amazon is reportedly in talks to pump billions of dollars more into AI start-up Anthropic,…

2 hours ago

FTX’s Caroline Ellison Begins Her Two Year Prison Sentence

Star witness for the US prosecution of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, has begun her two…

3 hours ago

More Layoffs For iRobot Staff After Abandoned Amazon Deal

After axing 31 percent of its workforce when it failed to be acquired by Amazon,…

20 hours ago

Mozilla Foundation Confirms Layoffs, Eliminates Advocacy Division

Mozilla Foundation axes 30 percent of its staff, and is eliminating its Advocacy Division that…

21 hours ago

Google To Make MFA Mandatory Next Year

Improving security. Mandatory multi-factor authentication (MFA) is coming to the Google Cloud by the end…

22 hours ago

UK Government Launch AI Safety Platform For Businesses

New AI assurance platform from UK government will help businesses ensure they can safely develop…

23 hours ago