Nebulon adds Ansible support for infrastructure deployment • The Register

Nebulon has integrated its smartInfrastructure platform with Red Hat’s Ansible software – including a set of modules that allow users to automate Nebulon infrastructure deployment and management by using Ansible Playbooks.

The Nebulon Ansible Collection, when combined with the firm’s Nebulon ON cloud-based control plane used for management, is claimed to reduce operational overheads by up to 75 per cent compared with operating hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) or traditional three-tier server infrastructure, according to Nebulon.

Nebulon’s infrastructure platform is based on a PCIe card called the Services Processing Unit (SPU), which fits inside server nodes and controls all the storage drives in each node. Each SPU is linked to all the others in a cluster via dedicated Ethernet connections, effectively producing a kind of distributed storage area network (SAN) that is configurable via the cloud-hosted Nebulon ON control plane.

The advantage of this arrangement is that Nebulon’s smartInfrastructure does not use up any CPU or memory resources from an application cluster, unlike HCI, which uses up some CPU cycles for the handling of the software-defined storage layer.

Meanwhile, Red Hat’s Ansible technology is aimed at providing a framework for the automation of provisioning and management of compute infrastructure across cloud, virtual, and physical environments. Ansible uses Playbooks to record and execute the configuration, deployment, and orchestration of the infrastructure.

With the Nebulon Ansible Collection, enterprises choosing Nebulon infrastructure can now deploy it and configure applications entirely from within their Ansible playbooks as an alternative to the workload-aware templates that Nebulon already offers to configure clusters of nodes into a shared storage pool, which the firm calls an nPod.

Nebulon claims that organisations and service providers want to move away from managing their IT infrastructure manually and instead are seeking to adopt automation frameworks.

“We are proud to make automation tools and infrastructure solutions accessible for our customers, and ultimately allow them to automate their infrastructure like the biggest cloud vendors would,” Nebulon CEO Siamak Nazari said in a statement.

Nebulon’s smartInfrastructure platform is made available to enterprise customers through partnerships with major systems vendors including HPE, Lenovo, and Supermicro, which also provide the first line of support. ®