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Rackspace Releases Cloud Stack As Open Source

Posted by timothy on from the sounds-a-bit-diffuse dept.

zerocool^ writes "Techcrunch is reporting that Rackspace is open-sourcing their cloud computing technologies, under the name OpenStack. Rackspace has chosen to release under the Apache 2.0 license. The initial release encompasses the cloud object storage and cloud virtual server management suites. Along with this release, NASA is contributing technology from its Nebula Cloud Platform. Early partners include Intel, Dell, and Citrix."

65 comments

  1. Good licence, has anti-swpat clause by ciaran_o_riordan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Among the permissive licences, Apache 2.0 has the best patent retaliation clause:

    If You institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.

    --
    Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
    1. Re:Good licence, has anti-swpat clause by zwei2stein · · Score: 4, Informative

      It is basically same thing that most big companies do to each other: Before you sue us because of patent issues, remember that we hold quite a bit of patents too. Patents that you use. MAD doctrine minus nukes, plus patents.

      --
      -- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
    2. Re:Good licence, has anti-swpat clause by OeLeWaPpErKe · · Score: 1

      You do realize that this will never hold up in court, right ?

      It is not allowed, for obvious reasons, to threaten someone out of using the court system. Everyone has a right to file a complaint, for any reason, against anyone (except in Europe the king of the country in question), without any consequences.

      Does it really need to be explained why ?

    3. Re:Good licence, has anti-swpat clause by ciaran_o_riordan · · Score: 2, Interesting

      > Everyone has a right to file a complaint [...] without any consequences.

      That's true for violations of criminal law (the State v. X, e.g. murder), but not for civil offences (X v. Y, e.g. copyright dispute).

      Your suggestion would invalidate every promise not to sue. The software industry uses loads of promises not to sue. All the lawyers that help free software say that a promise not to sue is good. What makes you think you're right and they're wrong? (Sorry to use an "appeal to authority" reply, but your claim has about as much support among experts as the flat Earth theory does.)

      --
      Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
    4. Re:Good licence, has anti-swpat clause by ciaran_o_riordan · · Score: 1

      Exactly. And we'll all be better off when companies looking for a "BSD-style" licence start choosing the Apache 2.0 licence instead of the others which users no patent grant and no retaliation clause.

      --
      Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
    5. Re:Good licence, has anti-swpat clause by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But you probably still must be a patent lawyer to like a situation in which all parties must hold patents to offset the danger of patents...

    6. Re:Good licence, has anti-swpat clause by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      Everyone has a right to file a complaint, for any reason, against anyone (except in Europe the king of the country in question), without any consequences.

      Any? Well, there's:

        legal costs (possibly the other side's too),
        being charged with barratry and/or tortuitous interference,
        being named a vexatious litigant,
        countersuits for malicious prosecution.

      But apart from those, no consequences at all.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    7. Re:Good licence, has anti-swpat clause by sharkey · · Score: 1

      MAD doctrine minus nukes, plus patents.

      So MAD Cat and Dr. Claw are still involved? Cool.

      --

      --
      "Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
  2. All up in the Cloud. by Forge · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Ahh... Nothing brightens my day like more free stuff. Especially Cloud Stuff I may actually use :)

    Lot's of little boxes with AMD and Intel chips. No more big Iron. That is the dream. We aren't there yet as we still have an app or two that needs a $1,100,000 Sun box to run but this is where our data center is headed, A great pile of little servers and no concern if any one or two of them keels over.

    Posted from the chilly Data Center of a Phone Company/ISP.

    --
    --= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
    1. Re:All up in the Cloud. by zr-rifle · · Score: 1

      May I ask: what's your opinion on the TCO of "lots of little boxes" vs Big Iron, especially in terms of energy consumption and maintenance?

      --
      Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
    2. Re:All up in the Cloud. by xnt14 · · Score: 1

      Seconded; more OSS Tools are better for the people. :)

      --
      ~xnt14
    3. Re:All up in the Cloud. by LukeCrawford · · Score: 1

      In my market, Virtualization means that I will run fewer, much larger (I mean, not /big iron/ ... we're talking dual socket, 16-24 core opterons with 64GiB ram) servers, rather than many smaller servers. The market I rent servers to demands small servers. I can save a lot of money by running one 64GiB, 24 core monster vs 8 8GiB boxes.

    4. Re:All up in the Cloud. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not OP, but...

      Right now, I'm sitting here in my office drinking my lifewater and wasting time online. The machine I'm at is top-of-the-line and less than a year old.

      What do I use it for during the daytime? Data entry. The image disk they use is XP+IE6 so it can still work with the so-ancient-it-was-written-in-hieroglyphics webapp.

      The machine sits here, powered on (not allowed to turn it off) and wasting electricity 24/7/365. There's twenty of these in this office, and upwards of 50 offices in this building alone.

      Proper use of cloud computing software would be a godsend here, but the closest they get is SMS pushing windows security updates. Pathetic.

    5. Re:All up in the Cloud. by suso · · Score: 1

      Alan, is that you? Can I have some of your popcorn?

    6. Re:All up in the Cloud. by bsDaemon · · Score: 2, Funny

      All clouds are free... you just have to go outside to see them.

    7. Re:All up in the Cloud. by quanticle · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Lots of little boxes with AMD and Intel chips. No more big iron. That is the dream.

      As I understand it, Rackspace Cloud simply allows one to automatically provision virtual machines for applications in a simple and automatic manner. It is still up to the application to maintain synchronization between multiple instances and plan for failovers in case one of the servers goes down. So, unless the application has been specifically written for a "cloud" environment, the cloud is no more reliable than a single server. Deploying to the cloud won't make your application magically more scalable or fault tolerant.

      Many "big iron" applications assume hardware that's very reliable. As such, they'd require significant changes to allow them to run in a cloud environment, where there are no such guarantees. For this reason alone, many corporations will stick with their mainframes.

      --
      We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
    8. Re:All up in the Cloud. by mflahmflah · · Score: 1

      I think it's funny that they want to help the world avoid "vendor lock-in!" Open source is great, clouds are great, but a few hosting companies out there are capitalists and for profit enterprises. Mike Flaherty Online Tech www.onlinetech.com

      --
      Online Tech - www.onlinetech.com
    9. Re:All up in the Cloud. by Forge · · Score: 2, Interesting

      May I ask: what's your opinion on the TCO of "lots of little boxes" vs Big Iron, especially in terms of energy consumption and maintenance?

      This depends on your specific situation and the specific application and hardware in question. Where we have replaced big iron with lots of little boxes, the total Electricity consumption was about the same. But that was mostly because of age. Newer machines do more per watt consumed.

      The savings come from increased reliability and reduced hardware cost. I.e. The Million Dollar Sun box mentioned in my initial post would be replaced by about a dozen $5,000 Dell Servers. This won't happen anytime soon however as the software is not written for the cloud and porting it is none trivial.

      --
      --= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
    10. Re:All up in the Cloud. by Forge · · Score: 1

      It is all cost vs Benefit. If a company can get a major application ported to a cloud environment at a fraction of the cost of moving it to the next generation of compatible big iron, they will do just that.

      Hardware, Software, Support, Power, Space, Labor etc... All costs matter.

      This is why Linux is taking over more jobs in the Data Center and when it dose loose a task it's usually to a more specialized Open Platform, Like our bandwidth testing server which we dumped on an old 1u Sun box running OpenBSD, so we could avoid buying a box for that small job, cluttering a virtual environment with this none critical task, and be reasonable sane putting the machine on the other side of our firewall.

      --
      --= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
  3. video by porjo · · Score: 5, Informative

    There's a video up on youtube from BusinessWeek which gives a nice overview:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g71ULBQv208

    1. Re:video by FuckingNickName · · Score: 3, Informative

      Right, I see a diagram with three big areas surrounded by both circles and rectangles and with more little rectangles inside:
      STORAGE - CLOUD FILES
      INTERFACE - PUBLIC APIS
      COMPUTE - CLOUD SERVERS
      and two smaller areas surrounded only by one rectangle:
      CONTROL PANEL
      AUTHENTICATION & ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT

      And I hear quotes like:

      "OpenStack enabled us to better serve our customers. In an open-standards based cloud world, cloud interoperability and cloud portability is increased [...] Our cloud today is the second largest cloud in the marketplace and by launching OpenStack we further increase our commitment to the cloud."

      ...I was shocked that this little speech didn't end with, "Praise be to the cloud."

      Am I the only one that wants to stab my head with a fork whenever someone starts talking about "cloud" technology? Look, we've had compute and storage clusters for decades... tell us in precise technical terms what you're offering that's new and why it'd be suitable for general projects.

    2. Re:video by Nerdfest · · Score: 3, Funny

      I don't know you well enough to determine whether or not it's annoying enough to stab you in the head with a fork, but it is getting a little annoying.

    3. Re:video by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Oh come on, it's not that hard. Cloud computing services charge a rate more closely related to actual use. That is, per CPU cycle. Sure, you could previously rent mainframe time but that was (relatively) difficult to do and not likely to be on a familiar architecture to most developers out there. Cloud computing also gives you a lot of flexibility to ramp up the number of instances you use when you temporarily need more horsepower such as during your Christmas sale on your website or something. So in summary, the two main differences are: pricing more closely related to actual processor use and the flexibility to ramp up and down on pretty short notice.

    4. Re:video by value_added · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Am I the only one that wants to stab my head with a fork whenever someone starts talking about "cloud" technology? Look, we've had compute and storage clusters for decades... tell us in precise technical terms what you're offering that's new and why it'd be suitable for general projects.

      I think that's a disease that inflicts all companies catering to "enterprise" users.

      Most people have at least a passing familiarity with Microsoft's nomenclature, where everything is constructed with an overlong string of polysyllabic names, sometimes (but not always) prefixed with "Microsoft". Service names are just one example. On *nix, you have daemons with one-word names that you stop|start|restart. Useage is as clear as its configuration and implementation. Ask a Windows admin about a given service, and he'll probably know its name, but how it works, how it's implemented and how it's configured will result in a blank stare.

      Then, of course, there's the folks at VMware. Not only do they adopt the same enterprisey naming conventions that vendors like Microsoft use, but they go and change them to similarly nutty names, making no attempt to distinguish the new name from the old one. Their documentation, while reasonably complete, is bewildering to read. God help you if you are considering (or looking for) the "free" version of the "VMware vSphere Hypervisor".

      What I can't figure out who is who these people think their audience is. Technical people want techncial answers. Instead, they get vague references to "technologies", a few hundred links to "knowledge base articles", and yet another frigging "control panel" to dumb down and obfuscate everything.

    5. Re:video by zerocool^ · · Score: 2, Informative

      And, with a cloud object storage system, the ability to upload things and not worry about file replication / redundancy. That's the idea for the end user - redundancy is taken care of. OpenStack lets people not worry about the system that worries about end user replication.

      --
      sig?
    6. Re:video by quanticle · · Score: 1

      Ask a Windows admin about a given service, and he'll probably know its name, but how it works, how its implemented and how its configured will result in a blank stare.

      The push for "enterprise technology" to have "control panels" and "configuration wizards" is related both in cause and effect to the aforementioned Windows admin. The admin is dumb, so there's pressure on the vendor to make the software idiot proof. They attempt to do by wrapping all the "dangerous" configuration details in bubble wrap^W^W control panels. This only makes the aforementioned admins dumber, since they become reliant on the wizards and control panels and no longer know how to configure the application without those crutches.

      --
      We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
    7. Re:video by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Don't forget "Grid".

      *shudder*

      I particularly hate when people who don't know what they are talking about then use these words in a sentence. Their goddamn Linux cluster is not a "Grid" no matter how "hip" they think that word is.

      For the last ten years everything was sprinkled with "Grid", and for the next ten it'll be sprinkled with "Cloud" until the techno-hipsters find a new "in" word.

      I wish they'd just go back to posting on their twit-book or whatever they call it and leave the rest of us alone.

      Oh $DEITY, I'm becoming such a grumpy old man!

    8. Re:video by zero0ne · · Score: 1

      Not the case ALL_THE_TIME.

      I mean I don't want to be using scripts to re-image PCs / push software packages / check compliance.

      However at the same time I'm not necessarily a complete fan of what they give me to do this (Altiris).

      Hell yes it has saved me a crap ton of time dealing with 400+ windows boxes, but if there were a product that stood up to it on the 10,000+ node level, I would switch in a heartbeat.

      I guess windows7 is getting there. However migrating to linux + WINE has been tried and will never get approval even if you could prove it was more reliable than windows XP. Rewriting all the tools using open standards and for the web is honestly the ideal solution, but no one will ever do that.

  4. RPC Service Layer is very slim by Michael+Kristopeit · · Score: 2, Interesting

    i've built multiple instances of cloud architectures... generally it's not going to be much more complicated than it would be to describe how your datacenter(s) and database(s) and nodes are connected. generally the most optimization can be gained by adapting a specific application to the specific cloud architecture. there is probably a lot of vendor lock that comes free with this open source. i'm a fan of rolling your own in cases like this... it isn't very complicated, and you can add optimization cases specific to your application(s), and perhaps remove network calls or calculations that will never be referenced. it will take you just as long to hack away at the open source as it would to write it from scratch.

  5. ok, but what is it? by FuckingNickName · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Why is it that any article about something "cloud"y doesn't tell me what is actually being sold. Could someone give me a functional overview of what this software achieves, perhaps putting into the context of similar software? Thank you.

    (I haven't interacted with Rackspace since some fairly poorly supported dedicated server hosting about 8 years ago!)

    1. Re:ok, but what is it? by Sarten-X · · Score: 1

      The initial release encompasses the cloud object storage and cloud virtual server management suites.

      In other words, it's the software that lets people upload files to the distributed network, and the software to manage their virtual servers. Without looking any deeper, it seems to be enough to run your own cloud-based storage system. Need to store more data than one machine can handle? This might do it for you.

      --
      You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
    2. Re:ok, but what is it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      O.K, so how is this different to just using an FTP or WebDAV server in front of something like GlusterFS? I can see something vague about "distributed object storage" which implies there is some sort of database in there as well, but I can't for the life of me figure out what it does that something like CouchDB or Mongo doesn't do.

      So the question remains: what is OpenStack?

    3. Re:ok, but what is it? by f3rret · · Score: 1

      Mostly they're selling the same stuff they've always been selling, it's just now they got a fancy new buzzword.

      Isn't marketing fun?

      --
      Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
    4. Re:ok, but what is it? by quanticle · · Score: 2, Informative

      As far as I can tell, the software they've released allows you to start, stop and configure large numbers of virtual machines in a fully automatic fashion. In other words, you can set up your own cluster more quickly than if you had to set up all the VMs manually.

      --
      We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
    5. Re:ok, but what is it? by tomweeks · · Score: 5, Informative

      Hey there... man, :)

      In a nut shell, Cloud Files is the Rackspace equivalent to AmazonS3 online storage webservice or "file hosting service", except Cloud Files also includes CDN (content distribution services) via limelight. Cloud Servers is the Rackspace Xen offering, and Cloud Sites is the web and DB hosting services. All wrapped up with the Rackspace Cloud control panel and back end auth-API. Here's some sales-less info on them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rackspace_Cloud Scanning over it though I see that wikipedia article is a bit out of date. Our Cloud Servers offering DOES actually support Windows VMs now (in beta). Though I'm more a Linux guys myself.. ;)

      Part of the coolness is that between the Cloud Servers and Cloud Files systems, we have a publicnet and servicenet interface. The latter allows direct "intra-cloud" transfers, while public (external) clients can hit the same content via CDN (limelight), allowing you to distribute your content and load via embedded URL around the world without hitting any one data center.

      Tweeks

    6. Re:ok, but what is it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They are selling 'the cloud.' - in other words some fairly poorly supported shared server hosting. 1960s Timesharing all over again.

    7. Re:ok, but what is it? by Nethead · · Score: 1

      Had a chance to work for two weeks next to your Slicehost cages in STL at S&D. (Very loud drives, or just lots of them.) Looks to be a very insightful use of cheap hardware to make a robust system. It will be interesting to look at your released code. Thank you!

      --
      -- I have a private email server in my basement.
    8. Re:ok, but what is it? by pdbaby · · Score: 1

      They've open-sourced management code from their Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud provider (like Amazon EC2) and their blob store (like Amazon S3), meaning you can use this release to build a public/private cloud provider. The IaaS provider code ("OpenStack Compute") is a preview and they say October is their release date.

      As an open source cloud provider codebase it joins Eucalyptus, OpenNebula and a few others -- however (and since I've not used the rackspace cloud I don't know whether this is at all accurate) it should be much more stable since it's most of the code running a big cloud provider (whereas Eucalyptus and OpenNebula still tend to be rather flakey in my experience).

      What's not entirely clear is how much they're holding back from the release - they say OpenStack Compute is "the same technology that underlies two of the largest and best ones out there". If they push features over to the open source project to keep parity with their own implementation then it may gain (or, in fact, may already have - I've not looked into the code much) features such as energy efficient host cluster management, shutting down VM hosts when they're not required.

      There isn't really a major risk at the minute to doing this - the technology behind cloud providers is pretty simple, the cost of running a public cloud is buying and continually refreshing all the hardware and getting plenty of bandwidth and datacentre space to run workloads. Anyone with the money to spend on the hardware either probably doesn't mind spending some developer time building their own API (especially since if their customers use the API directly then having your own API is a good way to discourage customers from moving to another provider)

      --
      Global symbol "$deity" requires explicit package name at line 2. - If only $scripture started "use strict;"
    9. Re:ok, but what is it? by Sarten-X · · Score: 1

      To use the famous car analogy:

      Setting up the services to take uploads, insert files to VMs, set permissions, distribute, and maintain updates can be done, but it's like building a car from lawnmower parts. It'll work, right up to the point where something breaks. OpenStack appears to be a set of tools all designed to work with each other and do things right, without any re-purposing. It's like buying a pre-assembled car from a dealership.

      --
      You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
  6. Literally by Hognoxious · · Score: 3, Funny

    Vaporware!

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    1. Re:Literally by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This release is exactly that...vaporware. Let's see what happens in September. Hopefully this will be a good place to look in the future but right now I don't see that the players involved will drop their GPL licenses for Apache...

    2. Re:Literally by zerocool^ · · Score: 1

      https://code.launchpad.net/openstack

      Have fun!

      --
      sig?
    3. Re:Literally by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Have fun with what?
      https://launchpad.net/openstack-ipad/trunk
      No revision history. You are better off today to pick up a working solution like cloud.com or eucalyptus...
      I'm not saying that openstack won't get there but today this IS way to little to matter - no offence to the developers.
      This looks like a 100% management decision to just get something out there...

    4. Re:Literally by Rick_Clark · · Score: 1

      A few points:
      That is the ipad app, which is just a client that was uploaded yesterday.
      There are already ubuntu packages for most of the stack
      Most of the code is already in production either at NASA or Rackspace.
      Could.com is joining and adopting openstack.
      Perhaps more research before posting is in order.

    5. Re:Literally by Derge · · Score: 1

      Agreed! This is not vaporware.

  7. Linux Cloud Computing by helix2301 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This is a great step for the open source community and this might help give a big push into cloud computing in the Linux world. I know I read the Linux Journal and they are always talking about cloud computing and Linux being a strong back end.

    --
    http://www.thetechnologygeek.org
    1. Re:Linux Cloud Computing by lemur3 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I have been using the rackspace linux cloud computing platform for just under a year and i have to say that it is pretty darn cool.

      if this software has every feature that i currently get when buying access (like web front end for dealing with instances.. and the API etc..) it will surely be welcome to some opensource folks.

  8. Woodnitbecoolif by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They called it

    TITSPACE

    diggy-diggy

  9. Citrix by Alex+Belits · · Score: 1

    Citrix

    Dammit, there is nothing they can't ruin.

    --
    Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
  10. NASA? by Thinine · · Score: 1

    Why is this tagged NASA? Is it because it has the word "nebula" in it?

    1. Re:NASA? by flydpnkrtn · · Score: 1

      From TFS:
      "Along with this release, NASA is contributing technology from its Nebula Cloud Platform"

      --
      Here's to the crazy ones
    2. Re:NASA? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      From TFS:
      "Along with this release, NASA is contributing technology from its Nebula Cloud Platform"

      I'm still trying to decide if someone at NASA was intentionally trying to be witty or not, as the word "nebula" is a Latin adaptation of Greek the word for "cloud, haze, or fog".

    3. Re:NASA? by Leebert · · Score: 1

      Yes. NASA is full of excessively witty names (by geek definition) for IT projects.

      The best one, IMO, is NOMAD (NASA Operational Messaging and Directory or something like that), the Agency's MS Exchange system.

      Fairly well named, if you ask me: It is flawed, and imperfect.

  11. Buzzword Express by EriktheGreen · · Score: 4, Interesting
    (grabs fork)

    No, just take a few deep breaths and it'll go away.

    "Cloud computing" is the current buzzword express. Like "thin clients" or Ubiquitous Java or AJAX or any number of technological trends before it, it's a way for non technical executive types to "lead" by grasping hold of something they don't understand. It's a handle for managers to move large concepts around with. It doesn't matter that it's not a significant advance in technology, science, or cybernetics. Its purpose is to pick an arbitrary spot for the industry to orbit around for a while.

    Most importantly, it's a way for technical types to manipulate executives, managers, and marketers. Want to sell an idea or concept to a manager? Ride the buzzword express. Even if it's a no-brainer idea that should be done to keep the company afloat, and the managers are smart enough to realize that, the easiest way to sell it is to use buzzwords. This lets the executives know you're listening to them, gives them a warm fuzzy feeling of being in control, and distracts the marketing people.

    The Buzzword Express even labels for you those technical wanna-bes and young idealistic programmer types who have plenty of enthusiasm and not much real world experience. Just listen for the buzzwords...anyone taking them seriously can't be worth too much face time. It helps you weed out the riff-raff.

    The only cost is that you sometimes are forced to listen to announcements about it. Just keep breathing...

    1. Re:Buzzword Express by Maudib · · Score: 1

      The cloud space is certainly buzz heavy, however it does represent some major new concepts.

      The ability to provision/consume infrastructure on-demand via an API is pretty new. Certainly there was never a comprehensive set of services like S3/EC2/ELB/EBS/SMS exposed under a simple common API until amazon web services. This does radically alter the way small/medium business can develop applications and provision resources.

    2. Re:Buzzword Express by EriktheGreen · · Score: 1

      But... new != noteworthy.

      Can is also not the same as "will".

      Other than a few test or aborted development efforts and some niche markets, "cloud" computing has yet to become anything more than something for pundits to write articles about.

      I predict there will be a few showpiece successes for the technologies labeled "cloud computing" before everyone realizes it's just another marketing label for the same "let's run our programs on someone else's computer" tech that's been around forever.

      That'll happen about the same time that consumers/users/business owners realize they really want local control of their data, their computing power, and their applications, and start another cycle of decentralization of apps and systems.

      The wheel of time turns...

    3. Re:Buzzword Express by sys_mast · · Score: 1

      Don't forget Blade Servers...nice buzz word. OK i guess that's a specific technology, but so is thin clients in your example.

      --
      Those who can, do.
  12. Cloud.... by mrobinso · · Score: 1

    Smoke....

    Mirrors....

    Invoice....

    Repeat.

    --
    -- Karma whore? You betcha. --
  13. Awesome! by Improv · · Score: 2, Funny

    I hope this is more of the "we hope to work with you" type of release than the "dropping kittens in a box at the side of the highway" type of release. Either way, good to have software to manage this kind of thing.

    --
    For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
    1. Re:Awesome! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I hope this is more of the "we hope to work with you" type of release than the "dropping kittens in a box at the side of the highway" type of release. Either way, good to have software to manage this kind of thing.

      From that article that would also imply that no company would want to make money off of linux as it would change their revenue model. Oh wait!

  14. Good scheme but analyst thinks it's ambitious by mappingbabel · · Score: 1

    I reported on this for ZDNet.co.uk and the analyst i interviewed has a bit to say about what exactly is going to stop this from working. Feature, mostly about platform lock-in as the thing this scheme is fighting and the thing that may keep it from success is here: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/cloud/2010/07/19/nasa-rackspace-launch-openstack-cloud-interoperability-scheme-40089574/