Joyent, well-known on the cloud computing scene and a growing player in Big Data analytics, announced a partnership with Canonical today to provide customers with optimized and supported Ubuntu server images in the Joyent Cloud. Effectively, users will be able to leverage a Canonical-customized Ubuntu in the cloud.  The two companies also want to enable developers and enterprises to create mobile, big data and high-performance applications on Ubuntu and Joyent’s OS-Virtualized cloud platform.

“As companies, Joyent and Canonical share core values:  we both embrace community and open source technologies, and we both believe in delivering to users a high-performance experience that is tailored to their unique needs,”said Joyent SVP of Engineering Bryan Cantrill, in a statement.  “Running certified Ubuntu images from Canonical as hardware-virtualized guests on SmartOS in the Joyent cloud means customers will have access to best-of-breed features coupled with exceptional support.”

SUSE has announced theavailability of SUSE Cloud 3, the next version of its OpenStack distribution for building Infrastructure-as-a-Service private clouds. The offering is especially focused on data centers where administrators want to take advantage of multiple types of computing environments, and it has full support for VMware vSphere through integration with VMware vCenter Server.

SUSE Cloud 3 is based on OpenStack Havana and includes support for Orchestration (Heat) and Telemetry (Ceilometer).  It also includes support for OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder), OpenStack Networking (Neutron) and the plug-in model of these projects.