| By Maureen O'Gara | Article Rating: |
|
| October 22, 2010 02:00 PM EDT | Reads: |
11,640 |
Three months after publicly starting down the road to imprint its NDA on the cloud by establishing a large-scale open source cloud platform called OpenStack free for anybody to use, Rackspace Hosting, its BFF NASA and a reportedly growing OpenStack community made their first official code drop Thursday.
The milestone is called Austin - they're doing this alphabetically so presumably they have a ways to go - and it includes the all-important Amazon EC2-challenging OpenStack Compute provisioning engine that's supposed to blend the best of the Rackspace Cloud Servers widgetry that underlies its public cloud offering with NASA's own home-made Nebula cloud platform.

OpenStack Compute, which has commanded most of the work these last few months, is the engine that provisions virtual machines complements of either Xen or KVM and basically supplies the glue that holds a cloud together.
NASA favors KVM and Citrix was anxious that OpenStack support Xen so it's been kicking in the necessary manpower. The Austin release should provide a deployable proof-of-concept and test cluster of a couple of hundred physical servers and thousands of virtual machines, according to Mark Collier, Rackspace VP, OpenStack community and biz dev.
By the time of the next release, dubbed Bexar (say bear), in January more of the NASA-contributed scalability should be harnessed and the widgetry should run on a thousand physical servers. Collier figures sometime between January and the unnamed April release OpenStack ought to be production-ready.
Austin also includes Object Storage, Rackspace's contributed Cloud Files storage widgetry, its fully distributed object store.
Rackspace uses Cloud Files, the equivalent of Amazon's S3, in production so it only needed some spit and polish like making it easier to install and deploy, bug fixes and additional features like a statistics processor, enhanced access control and user-defined metadata.
Rackspace is now using the code behind OpenStack Object Storage to power its Cloud Files offering.
Efforts so far have reportedly focused on core features like the API and multiple hypervisors but in a statement the widgetry's so-called chief stacker Jim Curry, OpenStack's general manager, said, "We are much further along than we expected to be three months into this project, and the future is very promising. The community is rallying around the vision of an open source cloud alternative, which means service providers won't have to reinvent the wheel with proprietary cloud stacks, and cloud consumers will have the freedom to move their applications among clouds, whether an enterprise private cloud or simply to change service providers."
Rackspace kicked off OpenStack at an invitation summit in July attended by 150 people representing 40 companies. The project is now supposed to involve 35 or so organizations and hundreds of developers. Rackspace will be having another four-day summit starting November 9 and expects to play host to 300 or more people in San Antonio, Texas. The meeting is meant to fix the roadmap for the next two releases, including with the Bexar release in January.
Besides Citrix, NTT Data, which is working on longer-term features like live migration, Opscode and Puppet Labs, which have been working on automation and configuration, and Cloudscaling have been active in development, Collier said.
OpenStack is governed by the Apache 2 license. There will be no commercial license like that other open source cloud Eucalyptus.
Published October 22, 2010 Reads 11,640
Copyright © 2010 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.
More Stories By Maureen O'Gara
Maureen O'Gara the most read technology reporter for the past 20 years, is the Cloud Computing and Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025. Twitter: @MaureenOGara
May. 20, 2013 05:00 AM EDT Reads: 2,461 |
By Liz McMillan “Trust is an ongoing journey and sits at the foundation of any vendor relationship – the companies that don’t consistently earn trust won’t be around long,” noted Henrik Rosendahl, Senior VP of Cloud Solutions at Quantum, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “As they do more with cloud, trust will organically grow – maybe it’s just about meeting SLAs or seeing firsthand that data is there when you need it,” Rosendahl continued.
Cloud Computing Journal: The move ...May. 20, 2013 03:15 AM EDT Reads: 1,548 |
By Jeremy Geelan The economics of business are radically changing due to the way in which software and services are being delivered thanks to cloud computing. In his session at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York [10-13 June, 2013], Mike Kavis will cover six reasons for the disruption.May. 20, 2013 03:00 AM EDT Reads: 4,311 |
By Liz McMillan Learn about the complex regulations surrounding HIPAA compliance and other considerations for running sensitive data in the Cloud.
In their session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Frank Nydam, Director of Healthcare Solutions at VMware, and Ken Ziegler, CEO of Logicworks, will discuss the best practices for leveraging virtualization and cloud technologies without sacrificing security or compliance. Care providers, State and Federal entities, integrators and SaaS providers large and small...May. 20, 2013 02:30 AM EDT Reads: 2,048 |
By Pat Romanski In the face of rapidly increasing amounts of unstructured data, industry is investing heavily to turn machines into services and connect them to analytics engines that will extract an extraordinary amount of value and unleash a productivity revolution for both businesses and consumers.
In the health care, transportation and energy sectors alone, the combination of machine diagnostics software and analytics will eliminate as much as $150 billion in waste.
In his session at the 12th Internation...May. 20, 2013 01:45 AM EDT Reads: 2,557 |
By Jeremy Geelan May. 20, 2013 01:00 AM EDT Reads: 3,567 |
By Elizabeth White In an ideal developer/systems administrator’s world, most applications would deploy seamlessly to multiple platforms and scale elastically with minimal effort bringing the unprecedented agility of the cloud within immediate reach of developer teams and IT organizations.
OpenStack, a RackSpace and NASA initiative, is now managed by an independent foundation and is supported by multiple vendors. It defines APIs for compute, storage, networking, services, monitoring, and additional infrastructure...May. 19, 2013 05:00 PM EDT Reads: 1,460 |
By Jeremy Geelan Companies around the world are moving into on-premise private cloud environments. Many connect their private cloud to their public cloud service providers. In his session at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York [June 10-13], Brian Patrick Donaghy will talk about examples of what worked, what failed and why we should think about this evolution.May. 19, 2013 04:00 PM EDT Reads: 1,930 |
By Liz McMillan Enterprise cloud adoption revolves around pushing the BYOD movement and focusing on data security.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Ross Brouse, COO and President of Solar VPS, will cover how cloud adoption is driven by consumerism, humanity’s need to socialize, our addiction to new gadgets and the ability of data to stay secure in a growing collaborative world. The cloud is a drug and we’re just getting hooked.
Ross Brouse is the COO and President of Solar VPS. He is a tr...May. 19, 2013 02:00 PM EDT Reads: 1,297 |
By Jeremy Geelan Organizations across the world are increasingly starting to see the benefits of moving more and more services to the cloud. The focus on the cost-saving potential of cloud is rapidly shifting to completely transforming the business with cloud. As organizations are investing enormous sums on technology they are starting to realize that in order to maximize the return on investment and accelerate the business transformation process the first area of focus should be people. By ensuring the organiza...May. 19, 2013 02:00 PM EDT Reads: 1,679 |
- Cloud People: A Who's Who of Cloud Computing
- Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Dave Linthicum – Cloud Technology Partners
- Cloud Expo New York: Cloud Is Changing the Economics of Business
- Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Nicos Vekiarides – TwinStrata
- Windows Azure IaaS Reaches General Availability
- AMD and Adobe Collaborate on Upcoming Version of Adobe Premiere Pro Software to Enable Breakthrough Video Editing Performance Through Open Standards
- State and Local Governments Adopt Microsoft Dynamics CRM to Improve Citizen Service Delivery
- New Relic Q1 2013 Blazes Past Growth Targets and Reaches 40,000 Active Customer Accounts
- Enterasys Spotlights SDN's Impact on Traditional Networking in Upcoming Webinar
- Best CIO Practices Shared from SHI’s Customers
- Cloud Expo New York: Delivering Digital Marketing on the Cloud
- Cloud Expo New York: Deploying Hybrid Cloud for Performance and Uptime
- Cloud People: A Who's Who of Cloud Computing
- Cloud Expo New York: Best CIO Practices Shared from SHI’s Customers
- Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Dave Linthicum – Cloud Technology Partners
- Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Jill T. Singer – NRO
- Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Greg O'Connor – AppZero
- Examining the True Cost of Big Data
- Cloud Expo New York: Cloud Is Changing the Economics of Business
- Cloud Expo New York: How to Use Google Apps Script
- Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Nicos Vekiarides – TwinStrata
- Cloud Computing Bootcamp at Cloud Expo New York
- Windows Azure IaaS Reaches General Availability
- AMD and Adobe Collaborate on Upcoming Version of Adobe Premiere Pro Software to Enable Breakthrough Video Editing Performance Through Open Standards
- The Top 150 Players in Cloud Computing
- What is Cloud Computing?
- Six Benefits of Cloud Computing
- The Top 250 Players in the Cloud Computing Ecosystem
- Twenty-One Experts Define Cloud Computing
- What's the Difference Between Cloud Computing and SaaS?
- Virtualization Conference Keynote Webcast Live on SYS-CON.TV
- The Future of Cloud Computing
- A Brief History of Cloud Computing: Is the Cloud There Yet?
- GDS International: Global Warming Scam?
- Cloud Expo Europe 2009 in Prague: Themes & Topics
- Cloud Computing Expo 2009 West: Call for Papers Now Closed








“Trust is an ongoing journey and sits at the foundation of any vendor relationship – the companies that don’t consistently earn trust won’t be around long,” noted Henrik Rosendahl, Senior VP of Cloud Solutions at Quantum, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “As they do more with cloud, trust will organically grow – maybe it’s just about meeting SLAs or seeing firsthand that data is there when you need it,” Rosendahl continued.
Cloud Computing Journal: The move ...
The economics of business are radically changing due to the way in which software and services are being delivered thanks to cloud computing. In his session at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York [10-13 June, 2013], Mike Kavis will cover six reasons for the disruption.
Learn about the complex regulations surrounding HIPAA compliance and other considerations for running sensitive data in the Cloud.
In their session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Frank Nydam, Director of Healthcare Solutions at VMware, and Ken Ziegler, CEO of Logicworks, will discuss the best practices for leveraging virtualization and cloud technologies without sacrificing security or compliance. Care providers, State and Federal entities, integrators and SaaS providers large and small...
In the face of rapidly increasing amounts of unstructured data, industry is investing heavily to turn machines into services and connect them to analytics engines that will extract an extraordinary amount of value and unleash a productivity revolution for both businesses and consumers.
In the health care, transportation and energy sectors alone, the combination of machine diagnostics software and analytics will eliminate as much as $150 billion in waste.
In his session at the 12th Internation...
In an ideal developer/systems administrator’s world, most applications would deploy seamlessly to multiple platforms and scale elastically with minimal effort bringing the unprecedented agility of the cloud within immediate reach of developer teams and IT organizations.
OpenStack, a RackSpace and NASA initiative, is now managed by an independent foundation and is supported by multiple vendors. It defines APIs for compute, storage, networking, services, monitoring, and additional infrastructure...
Companies around the world are moving into on-premise private cloud environments. Many connect their private cloud to their public cloud service providers. In his session at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York [June 10-13], Brian Patrick Donaghy will talk about examples of what worked, what failed and why we should think about this evolution.
Enterprise cloud adoption revolves around pushing the BYOD movement and focusing on data security.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Ross Brouse, COO and President of Solar VPS, will cover how cloud adoption is driven by consumerism, humanity’s need to socialize, our addiction to new gadgets and the ability of data to stay secure in a growing collaborative world. The cloud is a drug and we’re just getting hooked.
Ross Brouse is the COO and President of Solar VPS. He is a tr...
Organizations across the world are increasingly starting to see the benefits of moving more and more services to the cloud. The focus on the cost-saving potential of cloud is rapidly shifting to completely transforming the business with cloud. As organizations are investing enormous sums on technology they are starting to realize that in order to maximize the return on investment and accelerate the business transformation process the first area of focus should be people. By ensuring the organiza...
New technologies allow schools, colleges and universities to analyze absolutely everything that happens. From student behavior, testing results, career development of students as well as educational needs based on changing societies. A lot of this data has already been stored and is used for statist...
A recent Gartner study states that the function of the modern CIO is in flux and that his or her future focus must incorporate digital assets (aka cloud-based data and applications) to remain relevant. Towards the goal of riding the sea change a compiler of stacks to a broker of business needs, secu...
In the coming years, big data will change the way organisations and societies are operated and managed. Big data however, is not the only trend that will impact significantly how organisations operate. Another major trend at the moment is gamification. Gamification will change the way organisations ...
We all talk about cloud differently, but is there a way we should be speaking about this tech?
Cloud computing is now a widely reported, if not accepted, IT movement that, depending on who you talk to, has changed or is changing the way businesses utilize infrastructure.
The age of data center automation is upon us. Whether it's cloud or SDN or devops in general, automation as a means to achieve efficiency and, one hopes, free up resources that can be then redirected to focus on innovation.
As is always the case when we begin to move further upwards, abstracting ...
Windows Azure Virtual Networks offers the power to open up several cross-premises use case scenarios, including Active Directory Disaster Recovery, SQL Database Replication, Windows Server 2012 DFS-R File Replication, Accelerated Cloud File Services with BranchCache, Hybrid Web Applications and MORE...
As the infrastructure cloud market (IaaS and PaaS) continues to grow rapidly, we are seeing quite a few customers who are delivering an application – whether it is a mission-critical or SaaS application – and basing their solution on VMware.
VMware Security Cloud Encryption cloud keyboard Cloud Enc...
Have you heard of products like IBM’s InfoSphere Streams, Tibco’s Event Processing product, or Oracle’s CEP product? All good examples of commercially available stream processing technologies which help you process events in real-time.
I’ve been asked what I consider as “Big Data” versus “Small Dat...
My fellow Technical Evangelists and I have authored a content series that steps through building your very own Private Cloud by leveraging Windows Server 2012, our FREE Hyper-V Server 2012, Windows Azure Infrastructure Services ( IaaS ) and System Center 2012 Service Pack 1.
Week-by-week, we walk ...












