Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: the cloud platform of choice

• Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is the platform for scale; delivers any workload on any substrate

• Telcos and cloud service providers trust Ubuntu for OpenStack and public cloud

• 14.04 Long Term Support release is Ubuntu’s third LTS cloud release

London 15th April 2014: Canonical today announces Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will be released on 17th April 2014, bringing a new level of reliability, performance and interoperability to cloud and scale out environments with support and maintenance for five years.

“Ubuntu is the primary platform for cloud – public, private or hybrid. In this release, our third LTS with deep roots in cloud, we raise the bar for efficiency and orchestration at scale. That’s why businesses are adopting Ubuntu as they move to the cloud computing era,” says Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and Canonical.

Global enterprises including AT&T, Bharti, Bouygues Telecom, British Telecom, China Telecom, China Unicom, Cogent Communications, Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, Korea Telecom, NEC, NTT, Numergy, Orange France, Time Warner Cable, Turk Telecom, Verizon and Yandex, as well as leading web scale services such as Netflix, Instagram, Hipchat and Quora are all building next generation services on Ubuntu.

“Time Warner Cable (TWC) is running Ubuntu OpenStack and partnering with Canonical as part of our strategy to improve infrastructure utilisation and accelerate service innovation, deployment, and delivery. We’re looking forward to seeing the latest 14.04 LTS release,” says Matt Haines, VP at Time Warner Cable.

“Using Ubuntu OpenStack is enabling NEC to maximise margins on cloud services, minimise cloud deployment risks and speed up time to market. The arrival of 14.04 LTS supporting OpenStack Icehouse version promises a great release for continuing to reap benefits of cloud,” comments Shou Watanabe, Executive Specialist at NEC.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS runs on all major public cloud services, creating a common platform that enables ISVs, SAAS providers and end users the freedom to choose the cloud provider that best meets their needs by service level, regulatory compliance or jurisdiction.

Canonical works with service providers including AWS, Azure, HP Cloud, Joyent, and IBM SoftLayer and SmartCloud to optimise Ubuntu and ensure a consistent, quality cloud experience. Choosing Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on those platforms enables users to deploy cloud applications securely, knowing they will be supported with patches and updates for many years.

Bryan Cantrill, SVP of Engineering at Joyent comments; “Ubuntu’s 14.04 LTS release provides the latest deployment features and cloud tools. Ubuntu is already an optimised option for Joyent’s high performance infrastructure, and the latest release continues to provide a well-supported and efficient platform for mobile, big data and other cloud workloads.”

Numergy is a leading innovator of cloud in Europe with a focus on providing services that comply with the data protection requirements of European enterprises and governments. “Ubuntu OpenStack is the foundation for our coming services and Canonical has been an instrumental partner in our work. The importance of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS as the platform for cloud infrastructure and scale-out workloads cannot be overstated. We are delighted that we will be offering Ubuntu 14.04 images to our customers and partners shortly after its release,” comments Patrick Debus-Pesquet, Chief Technology Officer at Numergy.

Hikaru Suzuki, Executive Research Engineer, Vice President, NTT Software Innovation Center says; “NTT Software Innovation Center (NTT SIC) is using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS for the development of a new cloud platform based on OpenStack. Canonical has provided us excellent technical support including their Cloud Archive service for OpenStack and NTT SIC is pleased for their effort. NTT SIC further expects Canonical’s experiences and technical knowledge to help us build a zero-down-time upgrading process. NTT SIC has great expectations for upcoming Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to be the next generation platform of our OpenStack development.”

Ubuntu is the most interoperable OpenStack platform, with an OpenStack Interop Lab (OIL) that covers partners such as Cisco, Brocade, Dell, EMC, Emulex, Fusion-io, Mellanox Technologies, Open Compute, HP, IBM, Inktank/Ceph, Intel, Juniper, LSi, SeaMicro and VMware. The Lab runs over 3,000 OpenStack tests each week, using different combinations of Ubuntu, OpenStack and third party technologies, to provide customer assurance of interoperability and performance with their preferred solutions in private OpenStack environments.

“AMD and Canonical’s collaboration enables Ubuntu 14.04 LTS take full advantage of the AMD’s SM15000 capabilities to provide the fastest, most efficient scale out data center infrastructure with unmatched scalability. The combination delivers capabilities to automate the deployment of workloads to accelerate the development and introduction of new services. The collaboration spans both physical and virtual machines and offers the flexibility and versatility needed in today’s hyperscale data center,” comments Dhiraj Mallick Corporate Vice President and General Manager Data Center Server Solutions, AMD.

“Ubuntu with OpenStack Icehouse is one of the ideal platforms for customers deploying cloud as well as next generation software defined storage environments supported with Brocade network infrastructure,” says Ken Ross, Director, Product Management, Management Products, Brocade.

Lew Tucker, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Cloud Computing at Cisco says: “Canonical is an important element of Cisco’s OpenStack partner ecosystem for our Application Centric Infrastructure. We believe Ubuntu 14.04 will deliver the scale, reliability and performance customers are looking for in OpenStack solutions on Cisco’s Unified Computing System and Nexus 1000V virtual networking platform.”

Jose De La Rosa, Dell Linux Engineering comments; “The enhanced collaboration efforts between Dell and Canonical over the last year have ensured that Ubuntu LTS releases and Canonical’s cloud deployment tools continue to run smoothly on Dell PowerEdge and PowerEdge-C servers. We look forward to continuing that relationship with Canonical on the 14.04 LTS release.”

EMC, the industry leader in storage solutions, continues to address enterprise OpenStack requirements by building differentiated customer solutions for scale-out storage with Canonical’s Ubuntu. “EMC is on the leading edge of a burgeoning market,” says Mark McLaughlin Senior Director, Office of the CTO, EMC Corporation. “We are working closely with Canonical to leverage the breadth of EMC technology and will continue this work with the arrival of 14.04 by certifying EMC storage solutions with Ubuntu. In addition, we plan to work with Canonical’s OpenStack Interoperability Lab to test compatibility with other services and applications.”

“Mellanox is pleased to participate in Canonical’s OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL) as a supported partner and is looking forward to the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release,” said Kevin Deierling, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “With this release, Canonical is adding VXLAN overlay and RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) network support as part of the Ubuntu OpenStack Icehouse distribution, enabling Mellanox’s customers to enjoy the benefits of RDMA over ethernet for faster more efficient storage and compute applications on our end-to-end 10/40 GbE switches and adapters in the Ubuntu Cloud environment.”

“Customers of ours that deploy SwiftStack Object storage software with Ubuntu deliver massive scale, and at unprecedented low costs,” says Joe Arnold, CEO, SwiftStack, “We’re excited about 14.04 LTS, it’s a key release that we know will underpin many future SwiftStack installations.”

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes new versions of Juju and MAAS to design, deploy and scale services faster than any other platform available today, on cloud or bare metal. Juju meets the DevOps imperative for agility, continuous deployment and integration, and MAAS provides scalable bare-metal deployment. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS also integrates the latest container technologies from Docker and LXC, OpenVSwitch for networking, and Ceph for storage.

“As the Docker project gains in popularity, people are looking for Docker to be tightly integrated into the leading platforms for development and production. So, we are very excited to see Docker in an official Ubuntu archive with 14.04. There has long been a strong relationship between Docker and Ubuntu, and 14.04 LTS provides tight integration for developers to get access to some of the most important scale out technologies available today,” comments Ben Golub, CEO Docker.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS introduces support for IBM Power Systems and POWER, the open architecture from IBM, which is at the centre of the OpenPOWER Consortium, a cross-industry initiative to bring POWER to large scale environments such as cloud and analytics.

“Through our new collaboration, we are excited to extend our IBM Power Systems Linux offerings by having Canonical’s Ubuntu OS available on POWER8 servers,” says Doug Balog, IBM, General Manager, Power Systems. “This partnership provides our clients seamless and easy migration to Power Systems for unmatched big data and analytics performance and for simplified cloud deployments with superior performance economics. The active Linux community joined with IBM’s Power Systems’ open server ecosystem together accelerate what’s possible with open innovation.”

Ubuntu is the first commercial enterprise platform for hyperscale ARM64 computing, targeting a range of enterprise and vertical market applications from hosting to telecommunications, with products due in 2014 from a range of global OEMs.

“ARM® and Canonical have a long standing relationship to bring next generation hyperscale computing to life” says Lakshmi Mandyam, director of server systems and ecosystems, ARM. “ARM Cortex™ is driving a wave of innovation in datacentres where the server infrastructure is the business, and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will help enterprises like cloud infrastructure companies, web hosting companies and social media platforms take advantage of this.”

“We are pleased to offer the first ARM 64-bit server-on-a-chip production silicon with full certification for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, including all the relevant server workloads and tools to allow commercial hyperscale deployments on X-Gene. The X-Gene plus Ubuntu offering means enterprises can now capture substantial TCO savings for their scale-out data centers,” comments Mike Majors, VP at Applied Micro.

“Ubuntu 14.04 on Cavium’s Thunder processors is the first commercially supported ARMv8 hyperscale computing platform in the market. This is a significant milestone as Cavium customers now have Canonical’s commitment for the Long Term Support model for Ubuntu on Project Thunder. Additionally Cavium and Canonical have continued to deepen our partnership as we together deliver the highest performing suite of ARMv8 based solutions for cloud and data center computing” said Larry Wikelius, Director of Ecosystems and Partner Enabling at Cavium.

“The availability of 14.04 LTS from Ubuntu is a great opportunity for customers to speed up and simplify the design process,” comments Sanjay Ball, end equipment manager for HPC and cloud, Texas Instruments. “With this release, customers can design for hyperscale computing on TI’s KeyStone II based C66AK2H SoC using Ubuntu environment for the first time.”

Ubuntu is now the enterprise platform supported on the widest range of modern architectures – IBM POWER, ARM64, x86, and x64. With commercial support available direct from Canonical, Ubuntu is the most reliable, flexible and feature-rich platform for modern enterprise deployments.

Other supporting statements

Jay Lyman, Senior Analyst, 451 Research: “451 Research estimates OpenStack distributions to be an $82m market by 2014 and a $119m market by 2015. With many OpenStack deployments being built on Ubuntu today, the launch of 14.04 LTS and its latest capabilities and features make it an important consideration for any organisation building cloud environments today and going forward.”

“We are very pleased that Percona XtraDB Cluster is included in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Many organisations that use MySQL need high availability solutions to ensure that their applications meet the expectations of their users. Percona XtraDB Cluster is an easy to use, open source solution for MySQL clustering which addresses these high availability needs. We continue to see growth in Ubuntu usage by our customers and our open source software users so we are confident that the inclusion of Percona XtraDB Cluster in Ubuntu 14.04 will help spread the adoption of cost-effective, high availability MySQL.” Peter Zaitsev, Co-Founder and CEO at Percona.

Kevin Jackson, key author and leader in the OpenStack community: “Ubuntu has helped establish OpenStack as the leading open cloud platform today and the Ubuntu Cloud Archive is the default way for many to get the latest stable releases of OpenStack. 14.04 LTS with Icehouse is much anticipated by the OpenStack community as offering the right blend of stability and access to the latest cloud capabilities.”

Availability
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is available to download from 17 April at www.ubuntu.com/download