Fujitsu Dumps Neutron for Midokura in OpenStack Cloud

OpenStack is gaining in popularity, but several components of the open source cloud infrastructure software family still leave a lot to be desired. OpenStack networking is one.

As part of a larger push into the private cloud realm, Fujitsu announced today it will make network virtualization software from Midokura a core element of its OpenStack-based private cloud platform.

Ashish Mukharji, director of business development for Midokura, said this latest effort builds on an existing alliance between the two companies that revolves around the Midokura Enteprise MidoNet (MEM) network virtualization software that replaces the Neutron, the OpenStack networking controller, with a MidoNet plug-in which, according to him, scales better.

The latest version of MEM added support for flow tracing of virtual ports and enhanced Border Gateway Protocol Configuration session views, support for Puppet and Docker container environments.

As one of the many providers of technologies that can plug into OpenStack, Midokura has been making a case for an open source version of its MidoNet network virtualization software that scales across thousands of virtual ports. MEM is an enterprise-class version of MidoNet, strengthened with high-quality support and management tools. Fujitsu has been among the leading contributors to the MidoNet project has been Fujitsu.

Mukharji said Midokura was making a concerted effort to reach out to both OEM partners, such as Fujitsu, and systems integrators to increase support for usage of both MEM and MidoNet in cloud computing deployments.

“We’re working with about 25 partners,” said Mukharji. “We’re seeing strong demand on the private cloud side.”

In general, OpenStack is not an all-or-nothing proposition. IT organizations can choose to implement any subset of the software family. They can also opt to download the raw bits themselves or make use of an OpenStack distribution through which upgrades and extensions are curated and validated by a third party.

Most of the existing deployments of OpenStack have been executed by IT organizations with extensive engineering resources. But as OpenStack technologies become more mature the platform itself becomes more assessable to the average IT team. That in turn is creating a significant challenge for vendors like VMware and Microsoft, who provide similar IT management capabilities using primarily proprietary software.

The degree to which OpenStack will usurp Microsoft and VMware remains to be seen. No doubt many of them are keeping track of OpenStack developments, including launching pilot projects to gain some familiarity with the framework. After all, the price of open software is too hard to ignore, unless, of course, implementing and managing it proves to be more trouble than its worth.