Winn

Today is a big day for Rackspace Hosting. They announced a new project that Rackspace believes will change the way the cloud is developed and it’s called OpenStack – an open source cloud platform designed to foster the emergence of technology standards and cloud interoperability. In short, Rackspace will be opening code on our cloud infrastructure for public use.

The initial components being released through this project include the code that powers our Cloud Files (available today) and Cloud Servers (expected available late 2010). This project will also incorporate technology provided by other open-source projects. We expect to be joined by leaders in the technology industry and others to drive a deployable totally open cloud solution through this project.

Why is Rackspace doing this? Historically, most cloud offerings have been built on proprietary or closed platforms that create lock-in and make migration difficult. With OpenStack, any interested party – including our peers, Solution Partners and customers – will be able to collaborate with us to author, improve and expand OpenStack technologies.

Overview

• What the software does: The goal of OpenStack is to allow any organization to create and offer cloud computing capabilities using open source software running on standard hardware. OpenStack Compute is software for automatically creating and managing large groups of virtual private servers. OpenStack Storage is software for creating redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of commodity servers to store terabytes or even petabytes of data.
• Who it’s for: Institutions and service providers with physical hardware that they’d like to use for large-scale cloud deployments. (Additionally, companies who have specific requirements that prevent them from running in a public cloud.)

View it all at OpenStack…