SUSE and Dell Have a Cloudy Future: SUSE Cloud is the first enterprise-class OpenStack-based reference platform from Dell

Last week at SUSECon, John Igoe from Dell gave a fantastic keynote in which he discussed Dell’s entry into the world of open source when Dell began working with OpenStack and constructed Crowbar, a tool designed to simplify OpenStack installation. And, most importantly, John announced SUSE Cloud as the first OpenStack-based, enterprise-ready cloud reference architecture for Dell.

You can watch a video of the keynote on SUSE’s YouTube channel where we’ve posted several videos from the event, but John went through the history behind the SUSE and Dell partnership and outlined the thinking and steps that brought the two companies

together around SUSE Cloud and Crowbar. John is the executive director of the revolutionary cloud and big data group at Dell and saw OpenStack as a unique opportunity to get in on something big at the ground level.

Dell’s early work with OpenStack proved to be somewhat challenging as it had issues recognizing hardware, having BIOS problems, etc. The Dell engineers were concerned customers would never be able to install it. But as John put it, “Opportunity presents itself in very unique ways,” and Crowbar was born to simplify the installation of what would become OpenStack.

But Dell found they had a new and different problem. Dell is generally known as a hardware company. This foray into open source software was somewhat new for them and they needed a partner to help them with the challenges of supporting a large-scale open source community. I’m paraphrasing here, but Dell recognized SUSE is a perfect fit as we have the experience to build scalable, production-quality solutions that are easy to install.

All this brings us to the heart of the matter and the big announcement, the need by Dell for an enterprise-ready solution customers can use to deploy private clouds. That’s where SUSE Cloud comes in. Built on OpenStack, leveraging Crowbar, and running on SUSE Linux Enterprise server, SUSE Cloud answers the needs of Dell’s customers for enterprise capabilities and is being offered as an enterprise-ready OpenStack-based reference platform for Dell. That’s big news for SUSE, it’s big news for Dell, and it’s big news for our customers as it answers their needs and requests for a solution that is ready to deploy on a large scale in their enterprise computing environments.

This announcement is just the beginning as SUSE and Dell will continue to work together to bring customers new and innovative solutions to their computing needs leveraging SUSE Cloud and Crowbar.

This cloudy future is bright indeed.