OpenStack

Like many other enter­prise IT shops, Rack­space IT is turn­ing to ser­vice providers to help us design, pro­vi­sion and sup­port enterprise-class sys­tems. Our goal is to more effi­ciently and effec­tively serve our inter­nal cus­tomers. We want to take advan­tage of effi­cien­cies and scale that the open cloud can pro­vide and we need help to do it. With this in mind, we’ve kicked off a pro­gram called “Rackspace IT: Drive to the Open Cloud.” The focus of the program is for Rack­space IT to become an enter­prise cus­tomer of Rack­space, lever­ag­ing the same solu­tions Rack­space offers our many exter­nal cus­tomers and dri­ving as many of our enter­prise appli­ca­tions as pos­si­ble to the Rack­space open cloud.

The words “run like Rackspace” are something we hear from customers and prospects all the time. Everyone from enterprise CIOs to ISV development leads want to build private clouds that look, feel and operate like our open public cloud. They want the same software, the same configuration and the same operations that power our public cloud, but they want it all to themselves, most often in their own data centers.

With constantly increasing demand in compute power, data center space can fill up very fast. The problem with compute is that new servers require significantly more power than older facilities can provide. Thus, power demand limits rack density.

One of the most difficult aspects of migrating existing IT applications to the cloud is setting up appropriate storage for those applications. In fact, one of the questions I am frequently asked by our customers is how to set up Rackspace Private Cloud Software to enable their business take advantage of enterprise storage. This dilemma historically has not been easy to solve, since current cloud storage solutions require either re-writing applications to use object storage or using new technologies like NoSQL databases.

OpenStack Swift is a highly-available, distributed object store that you can use for storing all sorts of files, such as media, backups and archives.

Deploying, managing and running a large-scale, enterprise private cloud is not an easy task. One of our goals here at Rackspace is to make it easier for you to deploy and run clouds.

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.

When a team of Rackers powered up our Cloud in a Box for training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) this week, it wasn’t the only OpenStack deployment running at MIT. Not far from our classroom, the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) has its own significant OpenStack deployment that has increased computational capacity available to researchers by 25 percent to 50 percent, enabling more research projects, according to Jon Proulx, senior system architect.

We’re continuing to follow our technical training team’s four-night course on OpenStack at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Night three of the course focused on Swift, OpenStack’s massively scalable object storage system that was invented at Rackspace.

After a second night of Rackspace Training for OpenStack at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), it’s clear that students and researchers believe OpenStack can help accelerate their projects from aeronautics and astronautics to earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences.