Rackspace debuts OpenStack cloud servers
Following a four-month beta period, Rackspace has started offering its hosted servers and databases using the open source OpenStack suite of cloud software.
That OpenStack has been pressed into production use just two years after its launch, "is a great proof point for the maturity of the project," said Jim Curry, head of OpenStack at Rackspace.
Rackspace currently has over 180,000 customers of its hosted services. The company offers Windows and Linux servers, content delivery network services, and .Net and PHP hosting, all with associated management and monitoring services.
Starting Wednesday, when new customers log into Rackspace to requisition servers, they will interact with Rackspace Open Cloud services, which is based on the OpenStack Nova compute component. Rackspace has run the Swift object storage component of OpenStack for over 2 years for its Cloud Files storage service; it created the technology in-house and then contributed its code when it co-founded the OpenStack project. Read more...
Microsoft holds peace talks after Hyper-V booted from OpenStack
Microsoft is in talks for its Windows hypervisor to be readmitted to the Linux-for-the-cloud project OpenStack.
Rackspace, one of the prime movers behind OpenStack, said the cloud team is working with Redmond after Hyper-V was removed from the project's code because nobody was maintaining or updating it. Microsoft's software, branded "dead wood", was kicked out for the upcoming release of OpenStack called Essex at the start of this month.
Mark Collier, OpenStack founder and vice-president of business development and marketing at Rackspace, told The Reg: "We have spoken to them [Microsoft], they are interested." Read more...
Rackspace enlists Redapt for private cloud installs
Rackspace hopes to make it easier to use its OpenStack private cloud offering by partnering with Redapt, a company that procures, configures and ships servers to customers.
"One challenge we have is how to handle the physical setup in [the customer's] environment," said Jim Curry, general manager for Rackspace Cloud Builders. "This is what Redapt is an expert at."
Rackspace said earlier this year that it would offer its support services for private OpenStack cloud environments that businesses build in-house or in a collocation environment. To take advantage of the support offering, businesses must use Dell C series servers and a reference architecture released by Rackspace. Rackspace plans to support other server hardware in the future. Read more...
Cloudscaling set to offer OpenStack private cloud platform
Cloudscaling plans to introduce on Monday an OpenStack-based platform that enterprises can use to build private clouds.
This will be the first product offering from Cloudscaling, which built its business as a services company that helped others design and create their cloud infrastructures.
"We're introducing a cloud infrastructure suite of products that essentially delivers an Amazon Web Services-like cloud, but on a customer's premise," said Michael Grant, Cloudscaling's CEO. Read more...
Year-old OpenStack’s cloud future looks rosy
Rackspace's backing of OpenStack shouldn't be too surprising, given that the company developed the platform jointly with NASA. Still, Rackspace has signaled a deep commitment: The company recently revealed it plans to deploy the open source software across its entire cloud infrastructure. Specifically, the company is replacing its Cloud Servers VM-provisioning software with OpenStack starting this year.
Citrix, meanwhile, has also made a commitment to OpenStack in the form of a commercialized version of the platform dubbed Project Olympus. Project Olympus, according to Citrix, is a combination of a certified version of the open source bits of OpenStack that Citrix will bring down, test, certify, QA, package, and support, and a bundled cloud-optimized version of the company's hypervisor platform, Citrix XenServer. Due out by the end of this year, Project Olympus also promises tighter integration with Citrix's XenApp, XenDesktop, and NetScaler offerings. Read more...
Facebook, HP, and OpenStack join Linux patent shield
Facebook, HP, and the OpenStack project have joined the Open Invention Network (OIN), a consortium of organizations intent on protecting Linux and related open-source software from legal attack.
On Wednesday, the OIN announced that in the first quarter, 74 new organizations joined its "community" as licensees, including Fujitsu, Rackspace, and Juniper as well as Facebook, HP, and OpenStack, the latter of which is an open source "build-your-own-cloud" group co-founded by Rackspace. Licensees agree not to use their Linux-related patents against each other, and they receive free access to a collection of additional patents purchased by the consortium as a whole. Read more...