Breqwatr Upgrades Hyper Converged OpenStack Appliance

Looking to make it simpler for IT organizations to stand up private clouds, Breqwatr unveiled a hyper converged appliance based on the OpenStack cloud management framework.

Breqwatr CEO John Kadianos said that by bundling a distribution of OpenStack with its own set of Intel-based appliances, Breqwatr is making it easier for IT organizations to embrace private cloud computing using open source technology that would take them weeks to provision on their own.

“We’re delivering a curated OpenStack distribution with integrated hardware,” said Kadianos. “We’re taking the guesswork out of OpenStack.”

Now based on eight Intel E5-2660v2s that provide access to 160 Logical CPUs, Breqwatr Cloud Appliance 2.0 includes 24TB of solid-state drives configured within an object storage system along with 1,024GB of system memory.

As an open source technology, new additions to the OpenStack project are made frequently. Breqwatr essentially serves as an arbiter that stands between IT organizations and the contributors to the OpenStack project to determine what specific components are ready to be deployed in a production environment.

Built on top of the open source Kernel-based virtual machine software that is closely associated with OpenStack, the Breqwatr Cloud Appliance 2.0 includes components for virtual machine management, as well as chargeback and resource-based quota models. In addition, Kadianos said the Breqwatr appliance can be connected to a variety of third-party storage systems using an open application programming interface (API). Both NetApp and SolidFire are already certified Breqwatr partners. Breqwatr also has a partnership with Arista Networks, a provider of high-end, top-of-rack switches.

Designed to scale out as additional compute resources are required and using what Kadianos described as a purpose-built control plane, other attributes of the appliance include a graphical user designed to make it simple to configure the Breqwatr Cloud Appliance.

While not the only vendor to have created a hyper-converged appliance, Kadianos said that as IT organizations make the shift to OpenStack, the level of automation required to take advantage of those technologies has increased substantially. As a result, they will be looking to appliance vendors to help make a transition to a set of technologies in which many are unfamiliar. In time, Kadianos said Breqwatr may opt to make its software available separately. For now, it plans to continue providing an integrated hardware platform that is comparatively turnkey to deploy.