open source

Cloud computing and open cloud technologies are fueling innovation in companies of all sizes by saving them money, increasing their profits and enabling them to reinvest in key segments of their businesses.

The most creative and productive elements of our technology economy won a major ally last week when President Obama called out corrosive patent lawsuits and called for patent reform during a globally accessible Google+ Hangout.

A few months ago, Gartner Vice President Lydia Leong created quite a stir when she authored a report that questioned the altruism, or lack thereof, associated with the OpenStack movement. Personally, I can’t see why anyone in the OpenStack community was surprised or offended. It may have hurt some to hear, but Leong made a great point: open source does not necessarily mean open.

The constant battle a web site administrator must fight is the resource requirements of their site in contrast with the resource requirements of the configuration it is run on. In the end, this will almost always dictate how many user requests can be handled at any point in time. A common tool in the arsenal to fight this battle is to find clever ways to off load these common, or static, requests, off the server and allow it to spend as much time as possible delivering dynamic content as quickly as it can handle. This allows a server to not handle more request than before, but leaves it free to address more than previously it would have.

When we joined the Open Compute Project as a founding member nearly two years ago, we made the promise to work closely with partners to deliver data center solutions built on open standards.

If you’re not quite sure exactly what OpenStack is; you’re not alone. We’re frequently asked what OpenStack is and why we think it’s better than anything else out there.

David Kappos runs the United States Patent and Trademark Office. On Tuesday he gave a speech at the Center for American Progress where he gave a full throated defense of software patents. Here is a link to a pretty good article on the speech: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/us-patent-chief-to-software-patent-critics-give-it-a-rest-already/

Rackspace and NASA founded OpenStack in 2010, and since then the cloud operating system has seen explosive growth in several key areas. With the mission of becoming the ubiquitous cloud computing platform, OpenStack Foundation has attracted over 5,600 individual members from 87 countries and 850 different organizations.

OpenStack isn’t just leading the charge to open clouds; it’s creating jobs – hundreds of them.

At OpenStack Summit San Diego, Troy Toman, Rackspace Senior Director of Engineering for Cloud Compute, took the keynote stage to showcase how Rackspace built the world’s largest open cloud. In the presentation, Toman touched upon Rackspace’s journey to OpenStack, how Rackspace uses OpenStack today and how OpenStack needs to evolve in the future.