Like the authors of divconq, the people at Rackspace (a large U.S.-based hosting provider) have repeatedly tossed their hats into the ring of “cloud portability”. Today, Rackspace cemented its status as a cloud portable vendor by announcing “OpenStack”: an open source platform built, in part, through a collaboration with NASA (U.S. government space agency).
http://www.rackspace.com/information/mediacenter/release.php?id=8489
Rackspace wasn’t acting alone here either – executives from several partners were quoted:
“We believe in offering customers choice in cloud computing that helps them improve efficiency,” says Forrest Norrod, Vice President and General Manager of Server Platforms at Dell.
“(This) provides a solid foundation for promoting the emergence of cloud standards and interoperability,” said Peter Levine, SVP and GM, Datacenter and Cloud Division at Citrix Systems.
…and other companies listed in the announcement included: AMD, Autonomic Resources, Cloud.com, Cloudkick, Cloudscaling, CloudSwitch, enStratus, FathomDB, Intel, iomart Group, Limelight, Nicira, NTT DATA, Opscode, PEER 1, Puppet Labs, RightScale, Riptano, Scalr, SoftLayer, Sonian, Spiceworks, Zenoss and Zuora.
In its advertising Rackspace demonstrates that it truly understands cloud portability. They say their initiative:
- Prevents vendor lock-in
- Increases flexibility in deployment for a highly elastic commodity cloud
- Offers a bigger, more robust ecosystem for more tools, better capabilities and a stronger platform
- Gives you the freedom to decide how you want your cloud
- Drives greater industry standards
- Increases the speed of innovation in cloud technologies
Let’s hope other cloud vendors take note of this initiative and encourage the same open approaches that brought us Linux to bring us the next wave of innovation in the cloud!
