From the ‘Quantum Leap for Networking’ files:
Big news in the OpenStack world as the Quantum networking project is set to become a core project.
Quantum is a networking component for OpenStack that delivers networking technologies that that no other cloud stack (that I know off) provides. It first showed up in the OpenStack Diablo release as an incubated project and now it’s set to be a core project for the Folsom release set for the fall of 2012.
I got the opportunity to speak with Dan Wendlandt, Team Lead for Quantum Project at OpenStack back in September and was really impressed. He explained to me that networking within OpenStack to date has just been a sub-system of the Nova compute project and has had limited networking capabilities. The ability to have a multi-tiered network, with isolated network segments for database, web and applications is something that Quantum enables.
Quantum also implements a tunneling approach by way of a plug-in that is based on Open vSwitch which is similar to VXLAN (an emerging standard from Cisco and VMware).
Bottom line from all of this is that OpenStack users are the big winners. Cloud computing without proper network integration is really a misnomer – the cloud runs on the network and it has to have the same (or better) features people are used to0 in enterprise data centers.
Congrats to the Quantum development people. I know that you’ve still got lots of work to get done yet, but it’s clear to me that you’re on the right path.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.