To facilitate emergence of standards and interoperability in technologies that support cloud computing platforms, a group of IT vendors and the US federal space agency have launched an open-source cloud platform.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has donated to the OpenStack project intellectual property obtained in building its cloud platform called Nebula and more than 25 companies have made technological contributions in one way or another to the open-source platform, according to a news release by Rackspace, one of the most active supporters of OpenStack.
READ OUR FEATURE ABOUT BUILDING THE NEBULA CLOUD, INCLUDING AN INTERVIEW WITH THE PLATFORM’S CHIEF ARCHITECT JOSHUA MCKENTY
“Modern scientific computation requires ever increasing storage and processing power delivered on-demand,” Chris Kemp, NASA CTO for IT said in a statement. “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.”
Both Rackspace and NASA have committed to powering their respective cloud platforms by OpenStack. Rackspace’s donation to the project was code for its Cloud Files and Cloud Servers public-cloud products.
The hosting provider has also held an OpenStack Design Summit last week in Austin, Texas, bringing together advisors, developers and founding members to validate the code and ratify the project roadmap.
More than 25 companies participated in the 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.
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Keywords: NASA, Nebula, Rackspace, OpenStack, cloud computing, open-source cloud, open-source software, Joshua McKenty, Chris Kemp | |
