SUSE Inc., the long-time second-fiddle of the enterprise Linux world, has finally started shipping the latest Icehouse release of OpenStack with its private cloud platform. The launch comes more than a month after arch-nemesis Red Hat Inc. had completed baking the new version into its competing infrastructure-as-a-service stack,  time that the German distribution spent on adding advanced capabilities that position it ahead of its bigger competitor in terms of functionality.

SUSE Cloud 4 incorporates all the improvements introduced with Icehouse, including enhanced iterations of the Nova compute component and the Neutron networking service as well as support for two new sub-projects: the  Trove database and the Sahara tool for deploying Hadoop clusters. It shares all of these features with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform (RHELOSP) 5.0. Where SUSE has set the offering  apart is in its management options.

The company claims that the distribution is now the first on the market to support a high-availability (HA) configuration, a fundamental requirement for mission-critical environments. The inclusion of the feature is not only a major step forward for SUSE in its efforts to differentiate against Red Hat but also an indicator that OpenStack has reached a stage where some organizations may be comfortable moving important workloads onto the cloud operating system.

In addition to high-availability, SUSE Cloud 4 plugs into VMware Inc.’s Virtual SAN (vSAN) software-defined storage solution, which is not supported by RHELSOP 5.0. The enhancement builds on existing compatibility with the EMC Corp. subsidiary’s ubiquitous hypervisor and increasingly popular network virtualization software, rounding out the integration. That  gives the platform a strong advantage over Red Hat’s in the eyes of VMware shops, a category that includes the overwhelming majority of large enterprises and many smaller organizations as well.

Last but certainly not least, the new release works with Ceph, a distributed object system that has emerged as the de facto data management backend for OpenStack. But unlike with the other improvements that the latest version of SUSE’s distro brings with it, Red Hat beat the company to the punch on this one. The open-source stalwart has long provided support for the project and recently went a step further by acquiring Inktank Inc., a commercial distributor of the software founded by its original creators. Just two months after the $175 million deal was announced, the vendor rolled out erasure coding and cache tiering capabilities for its newly obtained Ceph distribution.

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