Cloud.com – Cloud Computing Today

OpenStack, the open source cloud computing project initiated by NASA and Rackspace, celebrated its first birthday on July 19. OpenStack’s open source code enables customers to create public or private cloud environments that deliver functionality analogous to that provided by private Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) vendors such as Amazon Web Services, Joyent or Verizon Terremark. The OpenStack project began with the support of 25 companies but has grown significantly over the last year to the point where it now claims the backing of 80 companies that collectively offer financial and technical support to a staff of 217 developers. Current contributors include AMD, Canonical, Cisco, Dell, Intel and Citrix and start-ups such as Piston Cloud Computing and Nephoscale.

OpenStack’s offering currently contains three components: (1) OpenStack Compute, which allows customers to create and manage a hypervisor agnostic cloud computing platform featuring a network of virtual machines; (2) OpenStack Object Storage, for storing petabytes of data; and (3) OpenStack Image Service, to take, store and provide copies of virtual running machines. The core of OpenStack’s offering, OpenStack Compute, allows customers to create an IaaS cloud environment using code that has been maintained under an Apache license.

Key OpenStack milestones during the last year include the following:

• March 30, 2011: Rackspace, Dell and Equinix announce plans to launch an OpenStack demo environment intended to entice customers to investigate OpenStack’s cloud computing products.
• May 10, 2011: Canonical’s decision that the 11.10 version of its Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud would be based on OpenStack instead of Eucalyptus.
• May 25, 2011: Citrix reveals plans to deploy Project Olympus, the first commercialized version of OpenStack.
• July 12, 2011: Citrix acquires Cloud.com, and promises to build APIs between Cloud.com’s CloudStack platform and OpenStack.

Dubbed the Android of the cloud computing market, OpenStack promises to radically transform the cloud computing landscape by shifting market share from private cloud vendors such as Amazon Web Services and Verizon Terremark to an open source cloud operating system. The first year witnessed explosive development of OpenStack’s code, including three code releases named Austin, Bexar and Cactus, respectively. The fourth release, Diablo, is scheduled for distribution on September 22, 2011. OpenStack’s first year also witnessed notable deployments by Internap, Korea Telecom and Piston Cloud Computing.

In its second year, OpenStack aims to build upon its development progress by inaugurating more deployments in addition to rolling out new functionality such as networking support and identity management. If OpenStack continues to grow at a rate that comes anything close to what it displayed in its first year, expect it to leave an even larger footprint in the cloud computing space by the time of its second birthday in July 2012.

On July 12, Citrix Systems announced its acquisition of Cloud.com, the open source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud computing platform that enables enterprises to create private or public cloud environments. Although the terms of the acquisition were not widely revealed, TechCrunch reports that Citrix Systems agreed to purchase Cloud.com for somewhere between $200 and $250 million. Citrix’s acquisition of Cloud.com comes less than two months after disclosure of its plans to commercialize OpenStack with Project Olympus, a product that allows customers to create IaaS cloud environments that leverage the OpenStack operating system code. The addition of Cloud.com’s CloudStack platform to Citrix’s product line means that Citrix can now claim ownership of XenServer hypervisor, XenApp, XenDesktop, Netscaler cloud networking products and the forthcoming Project Olympus. The acquisition of Cloud.com is expected to bolster OpenStack’s position in the cloud computing space because Citrix now promises to promote OpenStack utilization through the three pronged channel of Project Olympus, CloudStack APIs for OpenStack and its corporate support of OpenStack as an open source solution in contrast to a vendor such as Eucalyptus.

As a result of the acquisition, all Cloud.com employees will become part of Citrix. Cloud.com will henceforth be branded as Citrix CloudStack and belong to Citrix’s new Cloud Platforms Group. The acquisition gives Citrix a cluster of high profile customers such as Zynga Inc., GoDaddy.com, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., Nokia Oyj and South Korean telecommunications company KT Corp that used Cloud.com to create internal cloud infrastructures. A June 17, 2011 GigaOm post by Derrick Harris notes that Zynga used Cloud.com to create its internal Z Cloud alongside RightScale as a tool to manage the union of its Amazon EC2 public cloud and Z Cloud.