Internap released the first public OpenStack cloud

Look at Amazon and see that OpenStack is becoming a game-changing player in the cloud world. The first public cloud built on OpenStack was released by Atlanta's INTERNAP Network Service company in the United States in Thursday.

Internap's new service name is an open public cloud. The company has previously released a OpenStack cloud storage service and now publishes a complete OpenStack cloud service. Internap has been known for its VMware-based cloud services and will continue to provide it separately.

The open public cloud uses a low-cost open source Xen cloud Platform as its base hypervisor to support Windows and Linux virtual machines. "We use OpenStack and hypervisor--xen that are already mature on Linux to support both Windows and Linux customer operating systems," said Josh Crowe, senior vice president for product engineering, Internap. We appreciate the robust management capabilities of OpenStack and are using it to develop automated configuration, billing, and more. ”

OpenStack is expected to become a game-changing player in the cloud world because it provides a standardized set of APIs that the OpenStack community hopes will end the vendor lock-in, Allows an enterprise to migrate workloads randomly between the private OpenStack cloud it develops and any other public OpenStack cloud. OpenStack is an open source cloud platform that contains operating systems, storage, and network components, and is now widely supported by the industry. It was the first evolution of the Nebula Cloud project developed by NASA and was supported by Rackspace.

Today, Amazon's cloud platform is the most popular infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Although Amazon provides APIs, its cloud is not an Open-source technology developed by a similar OpenStack community. But OpenStack is not the only open source, community-led, nebula-based open source cloud platform. Opennebula is another large open source cloud community that has about 5,000 downloads a month and has a number of well-known large institutional users. Other vendors are also supporting competitive products. For example, Red Hat supports Deltacloud and is ready to hand over the project to Apache. Deltacloud also claims to be able to avoid vendor lock-in and deal with Multi-vendor APIs, including Amazon and Rackspace.

Internap's Crowe said Internap chose OpenStack for several reasons. Because of the Rackspace involvement, OpenStack was actually designed by the hosting/service provider industry, so Internap found it very suitable for large servers and multi-tenant workloads for public clouds. But Internap also appreciates OpenStack's "mature functionality, hypervisor-independent design, and its extensible nature." ”

Moreover, the industry's mainstream manufacturers seem to prefer OpenStack, which claims that 128 companies are currently involved in the project, including Cisco, Citrix, Gluster (a new Open-source storage vendor recently acquired by Red Hat), Extreme, Hewlett-Packard, Boko, Arista and Vyatta. Earlier this month, several heads of the project said the OpenStack project, which is still dominated by Rackspace, will be handed over to the OpenStack Foundation, which is scheduled to be established in 2012.

"OpenStack is expected to provide a consolidated, standards-based, open source virtualization datacenter." I think that as the OpenStack Foundation is established, we will see that cloud service providers will be more and more inclined to OpenStack, "Crowe said.

To date, there have been quite a number of OpenStack projects announced. Earlier this week, for example, Attachmate's SuSE announced that it would develop software for OpenStack private cloud. SUSE Cloud will be based on the latest version of OpenStack, nicknamed Diablo version of the development.

Then there is the nebula private cloud, which was created by NASA's former CTO and is currently being tested and is scheduled for publication in 2012. Then there is the piston cloud computing, which will provide the enterprise with finer granularity of security performance. Piston was created by the chief architect of NASA's cloud and is expected to deliver commercially available software by the end of November.

Dell is already testing high-end servers using OpenStack, the target market for large data centers and operators.

In addition, the OpenStack Rackspace, which worked with NASA to create the code, has also released its own cloud platform this summer to help companies build private clouds using OpenStack. Rackspace's cloud platform fully employs OpenStack.

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)