Johannesburg, 04 Sep 2012
SUSE Cloud, a commercially supported private cloud solution designed for enterprise deployment and simplified management of private cloud environments, is now available in South Africa.
Matthew Lee, SUSE regional manager for South Africa, says SUSE Cloud is powered by OpenStack and provides an automated cloud management platform for the rapid deployment and easy ongoing management of an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) private cloud.
"SUSE has 20 years' of experience in the commercialisation of open source projects and the delivery of global, enterprise-class support. SUSE Cloud enables enterprises to improve their resource utilisation and speed up service delivery by seamlessly managing and provisioning workloads across a secure, compliant and fully supported cloud environment," says Lee.
The SUSE Cloud solution also integrates with SUZE Studio and SUSE Manager, allowing enterprises to rapidly deploy, adapt and manage applications and workloads across both private and public clouds.
Lee adds that Business Connexion, the largest provider of data centre services in southern Africa, has deployed SUSE Cloud as the foundational infrastructure on which it will build a range of cloud offerings to better serve customers in the future.
Frans Labuschagne, senior services manager, Data Centre Services at Business Connexion, says open cloud technologies are viewed as critical for rolling out new services to customers.
"The ease with which we can deploy and manage cloud-based workloads with SUSE Cloud simplifies our installation processes, enabling us to set up clouds in our data centre quickly and reducing the tasks needed to add capacity as we grow. We aim to grow and enhance this platform and will do so in partnership with SUSE as the developer of the technology solution."
Lee adds that SUSE Cloud is based on the OpenStack project, which has contributions from more than 3 300 developers at 180 companies. As a key member of OpenStack, SUSE chose to base SUSE Cloud on the OpenStack project in response to customer demand and as a result of OpenStack's broad industry support and vibrant community.
"Open source technologies have been very successful in the cloud and we expect SUSE Cloud and OpenStack to attract a wider range of users across the enterprise," says Lee.
"The deliverables are improved speed and accuracy of services through a dynamic and flexible private cloud infrastructure. Line-of-business and IT staff can work together more closely, respond rapidly and accurately to new business and service requirements, and at the same time provide agility and support."
SUSE Cloud users also benefit from 24/7 worldwide technical support and fully integrated SUSE update processes for easy maintenance and patching of cloud deployments. Lee points out that organisations can easily prepare for hybrid cloud computing by building and managing cloud-based applications using SUSE Studio and SUSE Manager.
"By managing workloads across public or private clouds with SUSE Manager, companies can efficiently maintain and monitor their Linux environments inside or outside the cloud. SUSE Cloud also enables companies moving to cloud computing to make the best of their existing infrastructure and optimise their licensing costs," concludes Lee.
Share