
Ubuntu Server 13.04 Released
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Simultaneous with the release of Ubuntu Server 13.04, Canonical issued Ubuntu 13.04 for the desktop (seen here).[/caption] Ubuntu Server 13.04 is available for download. Canonical, which works with the open-source community to support Ubuntu worldwide (making money off support offerings), is positioning the server as the ideal platform for OpenStack, an open-source Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) used by many companies to build out their cloud services and architecture. To that end, Canonical claims that Ubuntu Server 13.04 is the only OpenStack distribution that makes high-availability (HA) a standard feature. Canonical’s alliance with VMware comes into play here, giving those companies utilize OpenStack clouds within their existing VMware deployments (such as VMware vSphere and Nicira NVP). This latest update also includes “enhancements” to the Juju orchestration GUI, allowing developers to better see the relationships between workloads and services running on various clouds (and thus better wrangle the massive amounts of data within those ecosystems). OpenStack has enjoyed a significant degree of uptake by larger enterprises such as IBM and Dell, which plan to use the technology in their cloud offerings. Earlier in April, a group of companies—including Hortonworks, Red Hat, and Mirantis—announced the launch of an ambitious effort codenamed Project Savanna, which will seek to join OpenStack with Apache Hadoop, an increasingly popular open-source framework for crunching large amounts of data.
