National Science Foundation Awards grant to develop next-generation cloud computing testbed powered by Red Hat

Red Hat announced that the National Science Foundation (NSF) division of Computer and Network Systems has awarded a grant to a research team from Boston University, Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) to help fund the development of a national cloud testbed for research and development of new cloud computing platforms.

The testbed, known as the Open Cloud Testbed, will integrate capabilities previously developed for the CloudLab testbed into the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC), a production cloud developed collaboratively by academia, government, and industry through a partnership anchored at Boston University’s Hariri Institute for Computing. 

As a founding industry partner and long-time collaborator on the MOC project, Red Hat will work with Northeastern University and UMass, as well as other government and industry collaborators, to build the national testbed on Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud technologies.

Testbeds such as the one being constructed by the research team, are critical for enabling new cloud technologies and making the services they provide more efficient and accessible to a wider range of scientists focusing on research in computer systems and other sciences.

By combining open source technologies and a production cloud enhanced with programmable hardware through field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), the project aims to close a gap in computing capabilities currently available to researchers. 

As a result, the testbed is expected to help accelerate innovation by enabling greater scale and increased collaboration between research teams and open source communities. Red Hat researchers plan to contribute to active research in the testbed, including a wide range of projects on FPGA hardware tools, middleware, operating systems and security.

Beyond this, the project also aims to identify, attract, educate and retain the next generation of researchers in this field and accelerate technology transfer from academic research to practical use via collaboration with industry partners such as Red Hat.

Since its launch in 2014, Red Hat has served as a core partner of the MOC, which brings together talent and technologies from various academic, government, non-profit, and industry organizations to collaboratively create an open, production-grade public cloud suitable for research and development. The MOC’s open cloud stack is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift.

Beyond creating the national testbed, the grant will also extend Red Hat’s collaboration with Boston University researchers to develop self-service capabilities for the MOC’s cloud resources. For example, via contributions to the OpenStack bare metal provisioning program (Ironic), the collaboration aims to produce production quality Elastic Secure Infrastructure (ESI) software, a key piece to enabling more flexible and secure resource sharing between different datacenter clusters. 

By sharing new developments that enable moving resources between bare metal machines and Red Hat OpenStack or Kubernetes clusters in open source communities such as Ironic or Ansible, Red Hat and the MOC’s researchers are helping to advance technology well beyond the Open Cloud Testbed.

Ericsson and Telstra achieve container-based commercial Evolved Packet Core milestone

Ericsson and Australian communications service provider Telstra have deployed the industry’s first live cloud-native container-based Evolved Packet Core for 4G and 5G services. The achievement is a significant milestone in network orchestration and automation.

The cloud-native container-based Evolved Packet Core has been deployed in Telstra’s production Network Functions Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVi), provided by Ericsson. It is fully integrated into Telstra’s mobile core network and is carrying live 4G and 5G Non-Standalone (NSA) traffic.

Telstra’s cloud-native Evolved Packet Core includes Ericsson Packet Core Controller and Ericsson Packet Core Gateway products. They support 4G and 5G Non-standalone (NSA) control and user plane functions in both a centralized configuration and edge-breakout configurations.

As part of this deployment, Ericsson’s Packet Core Controller is deployed as a cloud-native container-based Mobility Management Entity (MME) in an existing MME pool.

Both the Ericsson Packet Core Controller and Packet Core gateway are designed from the ground up to be fully cloud-native container-based solutions. They run on Ericsson’s Cloud Container Distribution (CCD) that is part of Ericsson’s NFVI solution or on other Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) aligned distributions.

Ericsson CCD provides container management and orchestration for the latest Ericsson cloud native applications. CCD can be run on bare metal or within a Virtual Machine in an OpenStack deployment.

Ericsson and Telstra have a long history of partnering in industry innovation. In May 2019 Telstra launched 5G commercial services using Ericsson solutions.  

This achievement is a key step in Telstra’s goal to build a web-scale core network and deliver the full power of 5G to consumers and enterprise customers. The containerization of core network functions will move communication service providers such as Telstra towards greater orchestration and automation of their networks. This in turn will help them to create and deliver new services such as enhanced mobile broadband, network slicing, mobile edge computing, mission critical vertical industry support and advanced enterprise services.

Containerized technologies are also designed to improve network resilience and software upgrade techniques to increase overall network availability for Telstra’s customers and services.

“Telstra and Ericsson are leading the mobile industry with this first container-based cloud-native Evolved Packet Core in Telstra’s production environment and carrying live traffic. This is an important step towards fundamentally changing the way both companies deploy and operate mobile core networks,” said Emilio Romeo, head of Ericsson Australia and New Zealand. “Core networks will become much more flexible and agile, allowing operators such as Telstra to quickly create and deploy compelling new services for their customers. This in turn helps operators build new revenues.”

“Through the T22 initiative, Telstra’s business is being transformed to improve service delivery and provide customers with enhanced experiences. To achieve this transformation, Telstra’s network needs to become more flexible and efficient, and cloud-native container-based applications such as Ericsson’s containerized Evolved Packet Core are a key element of this,” said Shailin Sehgal, product enablement technology executive, Telstra. “This is key to cost effectively scaling and automating our network and speeding up the delivery of innovative new services that are essential in a 5G world. We are pleased to be working with Ericsson to deliver innovation into our network that will assist Telstra maintain its industry leadership.”

Oracle makes it to DISA Impact Level 5 provisional authorization for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Following closely on the heels of Oracle achieving FedRAMP authorization, Oracle announces Tuesday three new government regions: Ashburn, Virginia; Phoenix, Arizona; and Chicago, Illinois. These regions have achieved DISA Impact Level 5 provisional authorization (IL5 PATO), providing a cloud environment where U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and other federal customers can harness the power of Oracle Cloud to unlock innovation, improve mission performance, and enhance service delivery.  

This is an important milestone in Oracle’s journey to deliver innovative cloud services with consistent high performance and exceptional security to the entire U.S. government. In 2020, Oracle plans to bring additional full-scale Gen 2 Cloud Regions online to support the classified missions of the US Government.

“U.S. DoD and other Federal customers are continually looking for new, secure ways to improve citizen services and keep our nation safe,” said Don Johnson, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “Oracle’s Generation 2 Cloud was engineered to deliver highly secure, high-performance, cost effective infrastructure that helps government organizations address the needs of the nation today and tomorrow.” 

Oracle has been a key technology partner of the U.S. government. Currently, more than 500 government organizations take advantage of Oracle’s technologies and superior performance. State, local and federal government customers using Oracle to modernize their technology include Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) and the U.S. Air Force.

The Department of Defense recently awarded a contract to Oracle for its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to support a large portion of the enterprise human resource portfolio. The award modernizes existing infrastructure and will assist the Defense Manpower Data Center in providing necessary human resource services and capabilities to its military members, veterans and their families.

With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, customers benefit from best-in-class security, consistent high performance, simple predictable pricing, and the tools and expertise needed to bring enterprise workloads to cloud quickly and efficiently. In addition, Oracle now provides organizations with a complete set of solutions for any high performance computing (HPC) workload, enabling businesses to capitalize on the benefits of modern cloud computing while enjoying performance comparable to on-premises at a lower cost.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has achieved certifications and attestations for key security standards and compliance mandates. These independent third-party assurance programs demonstrate Oracle’s commitment to security and to meeting the needs of the public sector. These IL5 PATO government regions will launch with initial Oracle services including VM and bare metal compute (CPU and GPU), storage (including archive, block, and object storage), database, identity and access management, key management service, load balancer, and Exadata cloud service.

“Oracle Cloud Infrastructure brings incredible performance, flexibility, security, and cost-savings benefits to our federal civilian, commercial and higher education customers,” said Paul Seifert, federal sector president, Mythics. “Mythics’ DoD customers will now be able to leverage Oracle Cloud to better serve the unique requirements of the DoD at home and abroad.”

“We’re excited to see the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure achieve DISA Impact Level 5 provisional authorization, as it provides additional options that our federal government clients—especially those seeking to migrate large and complex Oracle-based solutions to the cloud—can leverage,” said Anthony Flake, managing director of Accenture Federal Services’ Oracle practice.

Richweb boosts rural broadband with hyperscale carrier-grade network address translation from A10 Networks

A10 Networks announced that Richweb, a Virginia-based managed service provider, has adopted the company’s bare metal carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) solution. Richweb is helping to bring digital equity to rural communities across Virginia. 

As part of its infrastructure services portfolio expansion, Richweb aspired to provide CGNAT services to help its electric co-op customers bring high-speed broadband to more Virginia residents. It chose A10 Thunder Carrier-grade Networking (CGN) Bare Metal to extend its customers’ IPv4 address pools and ensure that critical network services are always available and reliable.

A10 Networks’ Thunder CGN solution provides high-performance, highly transparent network address and protocol translation, allowing service providers and enterprises to extend IPv4 network connectivity while simultaneously transitioning to the IPv6 protocol. In addition to hyperscale and rich application-level address translation features, the Thunder CGN solution also provides increased security to protect the services and infrastructure.

A10 Thunder CGN Bare Metal leverages the same high-performance architecture and features of the A10 Thunder CGN appliances. Bare-metal software deployments benefit from greater performance by not using a hypervisor, since they have direct access to the underlying hardware. A single instance of A10 Thunder CGN Bare Metal offers up to 40 Gbps of throughput.

“The performance of A10 Thunder CGN Bare Metal doesn’t waver,” says Jon Larsen, CIO and co-founder of Richweb, noting that open-source NAT products can experience unpredictable performance, impacting the subscriber experience.

Richweb deployed A10 Thunder CGN Bare Metal on its preferred server platform, which lowered capital costs and simplified operations. Servers running the bare-metal software can be upgraded independently from the hardware, giving the engineering team greater flexibility as business expands. 

“I like the bare metal because we can throw more cores at it and we can scale on-demand,” says Larsen.

Richweb’s engineering and operations team was new to A10 Thunder CGN, but deployment was smooth. “I expected it to be more of a challenge to configure Thunder CGN Bare Metal,” says Larsen. “It was simple. Thunder CGN just worked.”

“A10 Thunder CGN allows Richweb to be at the center of rural broadband services. Richweb provides the infrastructure services, such as routing, network address translation and peering, that electric co-ops need to deliver broadband to rural communities,” said Mark Lea, CEO and co-founder, Richweb.

High-performance, scalable CGNAT is part of a sustainable growth strategy for any service provider or enterprise. With CGNAT services, Richweb can make the most of their IPv4 address allocations, enabling them to serve more subscribers and more connected devices, while being ready for IPv6.

HPE Container Platform boosts application development for bare-metal and edge to cloud deployments

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced on Monday its HPE Container Platform, an enterprise-grade Kubernetes-based container platform designed for both cloud-native applications and monolithic applications with persistent storage. With the HPE Container Platform, enterprise customers can accelerate application development for new and existing apps – running on bare-metal or virtualized infrastructure, on any public cloud, and at the edge.

The HPE Container Platform is built on proven innovations from HPE’s acquisitions of BlueData and MapR, together with 100 percent open source Kubernetes. This next-generation solution dramatically reduces cost and complexity by running containers on bare-metal – while providing the flexibility to deploy on virtual machines and cloud instances. 

Customers benefit from greater efficiency, higher utilization, and improved performance by “collapsing the stack” and eliminating the need for virtualization.

The platform addresses the requirements for large-scale enterprise Kubernetes deployments across a wide range of use cases, from machine learning and edge analytics to CI/CD pipelines and application modernization. 

IT teams can manage multiple Kubernetes clusters with multi-tenant container isolation and pre-integrated persistent storage. Developers have secure on-demand access to their environments so they can develop apps and release code faster, with the portability of containers to build once and deploy anywhere.

The HPE Container Platform modernizes non cloud-native monolithic applications without re-architecting them, elevating the experience to modern cloud standards; provides the ability to build applications once and run them anywhere, bridging the gap between on-premises, public clouds and the edge; and improves productivity for developers and delivers new code releases faster, with simplified Kubernetes deployment and multi-cluster management.

It also ensures enterprise-class security, performance, and reliability at lower cost, with bare-metal containers and data persistence. 

This new solution complements existing HPE services to assist customers with container strategies, application modernization, and hybrid cloud deployments. HPE Pointnext provides advisory and consulting services built upon experience from over one thousand hybrid cloud engagements, with expertise and best practices from the acquisitions of Cloud Technology Partners and RedPixie.

HPE Container Platform software will be orderable in early next year along with advisory, consulting, deployment, and support services from HPE.

Cloudera Data Platform now available on Microsoft Azure; helps decide on analytic function both in the cloud or on-premises

Cloudera announced on Wednesday that the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) powered by Microsoft Azure. CDP is an integrated data platform that is easy to secure, manage, and deploy. 

Now available on Azure, it delivers self-service analytics with a consistent Azure experience and enterprise-grade performance across hybrid environments with the granular security and governance policies that IT leaders demand. 

CDP is an integrated data platform that is easy to deploy, manage, and use.  By simplifying operations, CDP reduces the time to onboard new use cases across the organization. It uses machine learning to intelligently autoscale workloads up and down for more cost-effective use of cloud infrastructure.

CDP manages data in any environment, including multiple public clouds, bare metal, private cloud, and hybrid cloud. With Cloudera's Shared Data Experience (SDX), the security and governance capabilities in CDP, IT can confidently deliver secure analytics running against data anywhere. CDP is a new approach to enterprise data, anywhere from the edge to AI.

CDP on Azure includes Cloudera's Shared Data Experience (SDX), which makes it easy to create a secure data lake in hours instead of weeks and replaces tedious scripting with 'set it and forget it' convenience. With CDP on Azure, organizations can speed time to value for data engineering, data warehousing, and machine learning. 

Cloudera leverages Azure infrastructure services such as Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) to run high performance analytics with increased availability and durability; Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to deploy infrastructure as code in Azure, ensuring rapid, consistent, and repeatable deployment of CDP services; and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to scale up or down depending on the analytics workload to meet service level agreements (SLA) and take advantage of the benefits of cloud bursting.

"For enterprise IT, this means that delivering speed and agility is now just as important as security and governance when it comes to enterprise data management and advanced analytics,” said Mick Hollison, chief marketing officer of Cloudera. “CDP, powered by Microsoft Azure, provides IT with an integrated data platform to work at the speed of business with enterprise-grade security, privacy, and compliance for any type of data."

"Cloudera customers choose Azure because of the freedom to build, manage, and deploy applications on a global, hybrid cloud offering using their favorite tools and frameworks," said Arpan Shah, General Manager, Azure Marketing, Microsoft. "I am excited to have the Cloudera Data Platform available on Azure."

Cloudera Data Platform is available for preview on Azure.

Airship provides OpenStack and Kubernetes at scale, secures confirmation as top-level OSF project

The OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors announced Wednesday that former pilot project Airship has been confirmed as a top-level Open Infrastructure Project of the OpenStack Foundation (OSF). 

Starting from bare metal, Airship manages the full lifecycle of infrastructure to deliver a production-grade Kubernetes cluster with Helm-deployed artifacts, including OpenStack-Helm. Airship allows operators to manage their infrastructure deployments and lifecycle through the declarative YAML documents that describe an Airship environment. One workflow handles both initial deployments as well as future site updates.

Confirmation by the OSF conveys recognition of a project’s success in meeting the goals of the pilot process and a commitment from the OSF to continue supporting the project. 

When evaluating a pilot project for confirmation, the OSF Board of Directors considers, among other factors, whether the project can demonstrate a strategic focus aligned with that of the OSF and its open infrastructure mission; well-defined governance procedures; a commitment to technical best practices and open collaboration, especially as conveyed by the principles of the Four Opens; or an actively engaged ecosystem of developers and users that demonstrates a growing, healthy and diverse community.