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OpenStack: The 5-minute Overview What the software does: The goal of OpenStack is to allow any organization to create and offer cloud computing capabilities using open source software running on standard hardware. OpenStack Compute is software for automatically creating and managing large groups of virtual private servers. OpenStack Storage is software for creating redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of commodity servers to store terabytes or even petabytes of data. Why open matters: All of the code for OpenStack is freely available under the Apache 2.0 license. Anyone can run it, build on it, or submit changes back to the project. We strongly believe that an open development model is the only way to foster badly-needed cloud standards, remove the fear of proprietary lock-in for cloud customers, and create a large ecosystem that spans cloud providers. Who it's for: Institutions and service providers with physical hardware that they'd like to use for large-scale cloud deployments. (Additionally, companies who have specific requirements that prevent them from running in a public cloud.) How it's being used today: Organizations like Rackspace Hosting and NASA are using OpenStack technologies to manage tens of thousands of compute instances and petabytes of storage. Timeline: Openstack was announced July 19th, 2010. While many components of OpenStack have been used in production for years, we are in the very early stages of our efforts to offer these technologies broadly as open source software. Early code is now available on LaunchPad, with an inital release for OpenStack Storage expected in mid-September and an initial release for OpenStack Compute expected in mid-October.

Fascinating story about Chris Kemp of OpenStack fame, and his recent effort to commoditize Cloud Computing hardware/software systems - Nebula excerpt: "Though it doesn't look like much, (about the size of a four-inch-tall pizza box) Nebula One is the product of dozens of engineers working for two years in secrecyin Mountain View, Calif. It has attracted the attention of some of Silicon Valley's top investors. The three billionaires who made the first investment in Google-Andy Bechtolsheim, David Cheriton, and Ram Shriram-joined forces again to back Nebula One, betting that its technology will invite a dramatic shift in corporate computing that outflanks the titans of the industry. "This is an example of where traditional technology companies have failed the market," says Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems (ORCL) and famed hardware engineer. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Comcast Ventures, and Highland Capital Partners have also backed Kemp's startup, itself called Nebula, which has raised more than $30 million. The origins of Nebula One go back to Kemp's days at NASA, which he joined in 2006 as director of strategic business development. In 2007, he became a chief information officer, making him, at 29, the youngest senior executive in the U.S. government. In 2010, he became NASA's chief technology officer. Kemp spent much his time at NASA developing more efficient data centers for the agency's various computing efforts. He and a team of engineers built the early parts of what is now known as OpenStack, software that makes it possible to control an entire data center as one computer. To see if other companies could take the idea further, Kemp made the software open source. Big players such as AT&T (T), Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Rackspace Hosting (RAX) have since incorporated OpenStack into the cloud computing services they sell customers. Kemp had an additional idea: He wanted to use OpenStack as a way to give every company its

Today Microsoft announced an open source cloud collaboration that may surprise some people, but not our customers and partners who have relied on our interoperability solutions over the past few years. Today Microsoft announced that it has partnered with Cloud.com to provide integration and support of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V  to the OpenStack project, an open source cloud infrastructure platform. The Hyper-V addition provides enterprise customers running a mix of Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies greater flexibility when using OpenStack. Until today, OpenStack only supported several open source virtualization products. Comment:  Microsoft needs to slow down Google and keep Apple's focus elsewhere.  Contributing a Windows only hypervisor to the OSS Cloud.com OpenStack project is one way Microsoft can hedge their own flailing Azure Cloud effort.  Read the Ray Ozzie good-bye letter.  The combination of Cloud, Web and Mobile Computing is the end of the Windows OS.

I've always liked the term OpenStack.  I also am up to my ears in Cloud-computing and Cloud Document management.  So it's only natural to type in the URL CloudStack.com and see what pops.   Here's what i found; a Texas USA operation specializing in P2P Jabber sync-share-store alternative to DropBox.  Very cool. "Dead-Simple Sharing.  No uploading. No emailing. No FTP." "We build p2web-based apps that help people share their photos, videos, and documents the simple way."