Mirantis and IBM team for OpenStack testing
OpenStack is a tough sell in the enterprise. Despite strong industry support, the platform is still immature and suffers from a lack of transparency about how it differentiates itself from VMware vCloud and Amazon Web Services. Mirantis and IBM are hoping to change that with Rally, a new “benchmark-as-a-service” solution that provides unprecedented visibility into OpenStack performance.
Distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, Rally consolidates management and configuration capabilities scattered across different projects in a single toolkit that aims to make it easier for organizations to move their OpenStack environments into production. It consists of four components: Deploy Engine and Server Provider, which perform the rollout, and Benchmarking Tool and Orchestrator, the sun gear in the center.
Rally enables users to simulate applications with different workflows and behavior properties, optimize their hardware for high-performance and spot bottlenecks, as well as automate various administrative tasks. The software is fully integrated with a number of open source tools, including Mirantis’ homegrown Fuel library, the Tempest testing suite and the Ceilometer metering utility. SoftLayer, the cloud host that IBM acquired in June for $2 billion, donated 1,500 bare metal instance to help “improve scalability and perform other previously impossible OpenStack testing” using Rally.
“When using OpenStack for production workloads, enterprises can be confident that OpenStack performance will meet the SLAs specified for those workloads,” commented Sesh Murthy, the vice president of Architecture and Technical Solution Design at IBM. “What is great about Rally is that it allows you to run a simulated workload on OpenStack for a period of time and report on workload performance against the SLA.”
IBM is among several big name vendors to have aligned with Mirantis and the OpenStack camp in an effort to push back against AWS. Ericsson, Red Hat and SAP had previously injected $10 million into the company along with existing investor WestSummit Capital.
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