Rackspace Announces Plans To Collaborate With NASA On OpenStack Project
Released on: July 27, 2010, 4:51 am
Author:
Rackspace Hosting
Industry: Internet & Online
Rackspace Hosting has announced the launch of OpenStack, an
open-source cloud platform designed to foster the emergence of
technology standards and cloud interoperability.
Rackspace, the leading specialist in the hosting and cloud hosting industry, is donating the
code that powers its Cloud Files and Cloud Servers public-cloud offerings to the
OpenStack project. The project will also 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.
"Modern scientific computation requires ever increasing storage and processing
power delivered on-demand," said Chris Kemp, NASA's Chief Technology Officer for
IT. "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."
OpenStack will feature several cloud infrastructure components including a fully
distributed object store based on Rackspace Cloud Files. The next component planned
for release later this year is a scalable compute-provisioning engine based on the
NASA Nebula cloud technology and Rackspace Cloud Servers technology. Using these
components, organisations would be able to turn physical hardware into scalable and
extensible cloud environments using the same code currently in production serving
tens of thousands of customers and large government projects.
"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, Cloud and CSO at Rackspace. "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. Rackspace recently hosted an
OpenStack Design Summit where more than 100 technical advisors, 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, Cloudscaling, CloudSwitch, Dell, enStratus,
FathomDB, Intel, iomart Group, Limelight, Nicira, NTT DATA, Opscode, PEER 1, Puppet
Labs, RightScale, Riptano, Scalr, SoftLayer, Sonian, Spiceworks, Zenoss and Zuora.
"OpenStack provides a solid foundation for promoting the emergence of cloud
standards and interoperability," said Peter Levine, SVP and GM, Datacenter and
Cloud Division, Citrix Systems. "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."
About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace Hosting is the world's leading specialist in the hosting and cloud
computing industry and has been ranked in Financial Times Top 50 Great Place to Work
in the United Kingdom for the past six years. Rackspace provides Fanatical Support
' to its customers, across a portfolio of IT services, including dedicated hosting,
managed hosting, virtualisation and cloud computing located within Rackspace's secure and reliable data centres.
About the NASA Nebula Cloud Program
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 further media information, please contact:
Brooke Hamilton
Rackspace Hosting
4 The Square
Stockley Park
Uxbridge
UB11 1BA
+442087342574
www.rackspace.co.uk
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