OpenStack platform player Siaras has achieved a successful proof of concept with enterprise customers of cloud provider and MSP KVH. Customers successfully spun up workloads in multiple but dissimilar data centers using a single cloud and WAN orchestration interface in the project, which used Siara’s cloudScape platform to federate a wide variety of cloud deployments.
The platform utilizes OpenStack to handle workload and connectivity orchestration across WANs and IaaS underclouds, including KVH’s hybrid-private cloud as well as public clouds like AWS. The result is that KVH can broaden its cloud service offerings while also reducing the complexity and time investment connected to implementing or modifying cloud deployments.
The proof of concept took place at KVH data centers as well as with workloads in the AWS Asia Pacific region. Connectivity was provided through the KVH network as well as using AWS Direct Connect. KVH was already offering their customers a hybrid-private cloud solution to bridge their dedicated computing environments to public cloud services based on overwhelming customer demand for both private and public environments. The cloudScape platform now takes that a step further, letting customers define policies and compute workloads for multiple cloud providers via a single interface so that applications may be run in separate clouds simultaneously.
"We are finding that the needs of our enterprise customers, many of whom are large financial institutions, are diverse and unlikely to be satisfied by a single cloud deployment," said Caleb Crane, director at KVH. "We see increasing demand to place workloads in cloud data centers best suited for specific applications and potentially move them as conditions warrant. Enterprises do, however, want to be able to federate all cloud and intercloud WAN services under a single umbrella and, in working with Siaras, we have been able to successfully implement that capability."
The completion of the project signifies continued momentum for the OpenStack open source cloud infrastructure solution. Last month, software provider Mirantis received a record $100 million in Series B funding to develop its offerings, the largest financing round of its kind in the open source space.
One thing is clear, the increasing number of investments and activity surrounding OpenStack signify a trend toward multi-cloud solutions, and that trend is largely being driven by enterprise customer demand.
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
