News

Rackspace Moves its Cloud Servers to OpenStack

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• April 20, 2012

Rackspace, the first OpenStack co-sponsor and co-contributor along with NASA, announced its cloud compute service is now based on the OpenStack platform. That means Rackspace has transitioned its Cloud Servers compute service to OpenStack, which customers can start utilizing May 1. 

The announcement was made this week in San Francisco for the semi-annual OpenStack Design Summit and Conference.

The  OpenStack effort appears to be gaining momentum with 155-plus sponsors and 55 active contributors, with  IBM and Red Hat recently announced their involvement.

The group earlier this month issued its latest release cycle of the platform, called Essex. The new release adds a Web-based dashboard (code-named Horizon) for managing OpenStack clouds and an identity and authentication system (code-named Keystone) .

The next release on the agenda is Folsom, which will add a number of new features, many of which are being determined at this week's OpenStack Summit. A key area of focus will be on a project code-named Quantum, which will provide advanced networking, said Jonathan Bryce, chairman of the OpenStack Project Policy Board and co-founder Rackspace Cloud.

"That will bring some really great capabilities for managing networks and not just routing traffic to virtual machines and back out to the Internet but creating complex network configurations that let you do more advanced security, that lets you do quality of service, VLAN management, really the kinds of things that enterprises want to do," Bryce said. The release goal for Folsom is this fall.

Update: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Rackspace Cloud Servers still must add support for object storage services, code-named Swift. Rackspace Cloud Servers already supports Swift. Likewise, this update clarifies that Swift is not part of the new OpenStack Essex release.