Network virtualization vendor Midokura is rolling out the latest version of its enterprise-class software-defined networking offering that includes support of the latest release of the OpenStack cloud platform and the increasingly popular container technology.
Midokura officials announced the release of the latest version of Midokura Enterprise MidoNet (MEM) this week during the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo. Also at the show, officials unveiled that MEM was being integrated with the Ubuntu OpenStack distribution, a move that will help the company expand the reach of the software-defined networking (SDN) platform while bringing a network overlay to Canonical’s offering.
The support of the Liberty release continues Midokura’s embrace of OpenStack and open-source platforms. The company a year ago open-sourced its MidoNet technology in hopes of accelerating adoption of the technology within the OpenStack community. Four months later, officials announced MEM—the enterprise edition of its SDN platform—would support the Juno release of OpenStack as well as VMware’s vSphere software and Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6.
The OpenStack Liberty support helps expand what customers can do with MEM, according to Midokura CEO Dan Dumitriu.
“Much like the recently unveiled OpenStack Liberty release, our new MEM technology delivers on the industry’s requests of a diverse community of OpenStack and container users,” Dumitriu said in a statement. “There’s a clear pent-up demand for automation as infrastructure density increases and our new technology release squarely addresses this.”
MEM creates an intelligent software-based network abstraction layer that sits between the hosts and physical network through decoupling the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud from the network hardware.
According to company officials, MEM acts as a Neutron plug-in to OpenStack Liberty, and it supports OpenStack Kilo and Juno. It also now supports the OpenStack Kuryr container plug-in, which integrates with such native networking components as libnetwork. Kuryr acts as a gateway between the container networking APIs and use cases, and the Neutron APIs and services, and it bridges the gap between Docker containers and OpenStack’s Neutron networking, according to Midokura officials.
They said the company will include more improvements with Kuryr in future MEM releases, and noted that Antoni Segura Puimedon, a Midokura software engineer, is a project leader on Kuryr.
The latest version of MEM is available now, and Midokura is offering a 30-day evaluation of the technology.
The partnership with Canonical in the integration of MEM and Ubuntu OpenStack is a win for both companies, according to Dumitriu. Canonical offers customers a robust Ubuntu OpenStack platform, he said.
“The only remaining gap has been the need for a networking overlay that is both easy to deploy and scale,” the CEO said. “Today, we are delighted to plug this gap with the availability of the MidoNet Juju Charm for Ubuntu OpenStack. Midokura looks forward to delivering simpler, more agile and more secure networking to Canonical customers worldwide.”
Juju is an open-source service modeling and deployment tool from Canonical. Using Charms, customers can leverage Juju design, deploy and scale services. The Midokura Juju Charm is immediately available in the Charm Store.