Canonical has announced the availability of Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS, the first enterprise Linux distribution to include OpenStack for deploying a private cloud. Users will receive maintenance and security fixes until 2017.
“Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS brings together leading Cloud, deployment and service orchestration technologies into a stable platform that will be supported on the most popular hardware in the long term” said Jane Silber, CEO of Canonical.
Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS is the reference platform for the OpenStack project. That’s why the combination of Ubuntu and OpenStack has become the platform of choice for businesses building private cloud infrastructure. Canonical has also worked with OpenStack contributors to offer certified, supported configurations for creating hybrid clouds – solutions spanning both the private and public cloud. In a special extension to the standard LTS policy, future OpenStack releases will be made available for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, guaranteeing a stable base for cloud pilots in the years to come.
Mark Collier, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Rackspace, said, “It’s great news for OpenStack users that Canonical has committed to support not only the Essex release, but future OpenStack releases, in Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS. It will be reassuring for enterprises to know they can standardize on this LTS release, while still having access to the latest OpenStack releases including Folsom and beyond.”
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS introduces Metal as a Service (MAAS) to bring the flexibility of cloud computing to physical server provisioning. MAAS handles deployment of workloads onto bare metal as if it were a cloud – spinning up physical machines on demand and recycling them for use with different workloads later.
Alongside Ubuntu 12.04, Canonical has delivered an updated version of Juju, the time-saving service orchestration tool. With devops best practice encapsulated in re-usable charms, Juju can be used to deploy complex services like Hadoop, Cassandra and Jenkins onto a workstation with exactly the same configuration as private or public cloud environments. It can even deploy on bare metal.
“Customers deploying next-generation scale-out solutions require a secure, high-performance platform that can support demanding workloads,” said Scott Farrand, Vice President, Infrastructure Software and Blades, HP. “Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating system on HP ProLiant servers offers the scalability and flexibility to manage big data, cloud and hyperscale applications.”
In this release, Ubuntu adds support for the latest Intel servers. And with an ARM version of the OS now available, it is prepared for a future in which low-energy, hyperscale servers come to dominate for many workloads.
Tom Lantzsch, Executive Vice President, Corporate Development, ARM explained: “ARM welcomes the availability of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as the first enterprise Linux distribution for ARM technology-based servers. This marks a critical ecosystem milestone on the path to highly efficient hyperscale web, cloud and big data infrastructure enabled by forthcoming ARM powered servers.”
