Fujitsu’s contribution to OpenStack

A couple of months ago, Alan Clark who is with the SUSE CTO office sat down with Yoshiya Eto in a series of interviews that covered a wide range of subjects.

One of the topics is around Fujitsu’s involvement in the OpenStack project. One area where Fujitsu has heavily contributed is to the OpenStack Bare Metal Provision Program known as Ironic. For readers not familiar with Ironic “is an integrated OpenStack program which aims to provision bare metal machines instead of virtual machines, forked from the Nova baremetal driver. It is best thought of as a bare metal hypervisor API and a set of plugins which interact with the bare metal hypervisors. By default, it will use PXE and IPMI in order to provision and turn on/off machines, but Ironic also supports vendor-specific plugins which may implement additional functionality.”[1] Why organizations need this is for the following reasons:

• Bare metal provisioning in the cloud of high-performance computing clusters
• Computing tasks that require access to hardware devices which can’t be virtualized
• Database hosting (some databases run poorly in a hypervisor)
• Single tenant, dedicated hardware for performance, security, dependability and other regulatory requirements
• Or, for rapidly deploying a cloud infrastructure

Some of this is covered in the interview.

Eto and Clark also discuss the importance of a cloud monitoring tool, especially as clouds get bigger and bigger. Check out the interview at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc1-j43XdTE&feature=youtu.be

[1] Retrieved 26 March 2016 from https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Ironic