Rackspace Hosting has announced the launch of OpenStack,
an open-source cloud platform designed to foster the emergence of
technology standards and cloud interoperability, the company said.
In a July 19 press release, Rackspace,
which claims to be the second largest provider of cloud hosting
services, said it is donating the code that powers its Cloud Files and
Cloud Servers public-cloud offerings to the OpenStack project.
Moreover, in an interview with eWEEK, Jonathan
Bryce, co-founder of the Rackspace cloud, said the OpenStack project
also will incorporate technology that powers the NASA Nebula Cloud Platform.
Rackspace and NASA plan to actively collaborate on joint technology
development and leverage the efforts of open-source software developers
worldwide, he said.
“Modern scientific computation requires
ever-increasing storage and processing power delivered on-demand,” said
Chris Kemp, NASA’s Chief Technology Officer for IT, in a statement. “To
serve this demand, we built Nebula, an infrastructure cloud platform
designed to meet the needs of our scientific and engineering community.
NASA and Rackspace are uniquely positioned to drive this initiative
based on our experience in building large scale cloud platforms and our
desire to embrace open source.”
NASA Nebula is a cloud computing service based at
NASA Ames Research Center that provides high performance compute,
network and data storage services to NASA scientists and researchers.
Nebula allows NASA to share and process large scientific data sets and
was one of three flagship projects highlighted in NASA’s Open
Government Plan. For more information, go to http://nebula.nasa.gov.
OpenStack will feature several cloud infrastructure
components including a fully distributed object store based on
Rackspace Cloud Files, available at OpenStack.org. The second component
will be a scalable compute-provisioning engine based on the NASA Nebula
cloud technology and Rackspace Cloud Servers technology. It is expected
to be available later this year, Bryce said.
“We’ve formed a group to open up the source code that runs our cloud platform,” Bryce said.
With the OpenStack software, any organization will
be able to turn physical hardware into massively scalable and
extensible cloud environments using the same code currently in
production serving tens of thousands of customers and large government
projects, Rackspace officials said.
“We are founding the OpenStack initiative to help
drive industry standards, prevent vendor lock-in and generally increase
the velocity of innovation in cloud technologies,” said Lew Moorman,
president of the cloud business and chief strategy officer at
Rackspace, in a statement. “We are proud to have NASA’s support in this
effort. Its Nebula Cloud Platform is a tremendous boost to the
OpenStack community. We expect ongoing collaboration with NASA and the
rest of the community to drive more-rapid cloud adoption and
innovation, in the private and public spheres.”
Rackspace and NASA have committed to use OpenStack
to power their cloud platforms, and Rackspace will dedicate open-source
developers and resources to support adoption of OpenStack among
enterprises and service providers.
“When we looked at this we looked at several
open-source projects and groups, but nothing else scaled to the degree
we needed,” Bryce said. “Then we saw the NASA code and we really liked
it. And it was written in Python, which we like to use.”
Meanwhile, Brett Piatt, technical alliance
manager at Rackspace, said an OpenStack Design Summit hosted by
Rackspace was held July 13-16 in Austin, Texas, where more than 100
technical advisers, developers and founding members joined to validate
the code and ratify the project roadmap. More than 25 companies were
represented at the Design Summit including AMD, Autonomic Resources,
Citrix, Cloud.com, Cloudkick, CloudSwitch, Dell, enStratus, FathomDB,
Intel, iomart Group, Limelight, Nicira, NTT DATA, Opscode, Peer 1,
Puppet Labs, RightScale, Riptano, Scalr, Sonian, Spiceworks,
ThoughtWorks, Zenoss and Zuora.
"We believe in offering customers choice in
cloud computing that helps them improve efficiency," says Forrest
Norrod, vice president and general manager of Server Platforms at Dell,
in a statement. "OpenStack on Dell is a great option to create open
source enterprise cloud solutions."
“OpenStack provides a solid foundation
for promoting the emergence of cloud standards and interoperability,”
said Peter Levine, senior vice president and general manager of the
Datacenter and Cloud Division at Citrix Systems, also in a statement.
“As a longtime technology partner with Rackspace, Citrix will
collaborate closely with the community to provide full support for the
XenServer platform and our other cloud-enabling products.”
To download or contribute code and get involved, visit OpenStack.org.
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