The Rise of OpenStack
OpenStack and Kinetic: Next-Generation Datacenter Storage Starts Now
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While companies such as Amazon and Google have been pursuing alternative storage structures for many years, the rest of the market was somewhat slower in following suit. However, by 2009, Rackspace and others were beginning to see that top-tier cloud platforms could be brought down to the mainstream and large enterprise space. A nine-person team at Rackspace took its Cloud Files product and converted it into what would soon become an object storage architecture code-named Swift. The following year, that effort and others folded into a joint open source effort with NASA (which had been working on its own platform) that became known as OpenStack. The object of OpenStack was to craft a cloud services platform able to deliver global-class quality of service and performance on conventional, off-the-shelf hardware, much as Amazon and Google were doing.
The first OpenStack release arrived in the second half of 2010. Ubuntu and Debian were the first operating systems to embrace the platform in 2011, and Red Hat followed suit in 2012. Meanwhile, other developers were beginning to take notice of OpenStack. For example, Joe Arnold was involved with the first OpenStack Swift (the storage module of OpenStack) deployments done outside of Rackspace. As he worked on implementations at clients such as Korea Telecom (now KT Corporation) and Internap, Arnold realized that even the largest companies were having difficulty adapting the cloud platform to their own operations. He soon went on to co-found SwiftStack in 2011, a firm of currently 25 people devoted to making OpenStack and open source cloud technologies available to all companies.
In a nutshell, OpenStack is a datacenter operating system that governs pools of compute, storage, and networking resources sitting atop a collection of shared services. All OpenStack code is publicly available and free under the Apache 2.0 license. This has allowed a host of companies, developers, and manufacturers to examine the platform and consider whether and how to build on it with their own value-add solutions. Such considerations have to be taken within the context of today’s cloud market and enterprises’ weighing the merits of public, private, and hybrid approaches to their future cloud strategies. For a few years, market momentum seemed to favor a broad shift to public cloud services, partially on the basis of ROI and capex savings, but private cloud has seen a resurgence that OpenStack is likely to accelerate.

Seattle-based systems integrator Silicon Mechanics, with its long history of supporting open source platforms, is one of the most prominent VARs backing OpenStack. But this isn’t simply a play for the latest, greatest datacenter keyword. According to CTO Ken Hostetler, his company’s early interest in OpenStack is being driven by customer demand.
“This isn’t like selling database servers or some established product line. There’s a lot of emerging interest in the idea of having a private cloud alongside a public cloud strategy, or possibly as an alternative to the need to go to a public cloud strategy. People are saying, ‘I can’t let my data go. I don’t want to trust the public cloud. Private cloud is so accessible now — why would I bother with public cloud?’ The specific reasons why individual organizations decide to engage in a private cloud are very nuanced, but a lot of them don’t want their infrastructure to be locked in by a given vendor. They don’t want constraints on their storage, virtualization, or compute sides. Or maybe they’re trying to break out of this lock to mitigate the cost of keeping large sections of their deployment in the public cloud.”
Cloudscaling is another solutions provider pushing the OpenStack platform into scaling-minded datacenters. Azmir Mohamed, Vice President, Product Management, notes that the leading “walled garden” option for private cloud today is VMware, chiefly because of that platform’s ideal suitability for virtualizing and adding automation to infrastructure for traditional enterprise workloads.
“But that's not where the future is,” says Mohamed. “Enterprises want to leverage the advantages of web app companies and use tools like agile development and commodity/open source infrastructure. That’s a future that looks a lot more like Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Engine — which build their clouds on open source software — than VMware. The trick is building an open source cloud platform that behaves exactly like AWS and GCE, so that enterprises have the option of an on-premise portion to supplement their public cloud choice.”