NASA and Rackspace Team Up for Open Source Cloud Computing Platform

More and more companies are adopting ‘cloud’ solutions instead of traditional computing infrastructures, but the market is still very much in its infancy. OpenStack, a new initiative from Rackspace and, of all organizations, NASA aims to solidify the market by providing an open and standard offering to enable interoperability between cloud platforms.

Rackspace, a hosting company, is opening up Cloud Files, its fully distributed object store based, and NASA is doing the same for its home-built cloud computing platform Nebula. Both technology stacks will be available under a permissive Apache license, but the details of the plans are still being ironed out.

"We are founding the OpenStack initiative to help drive industry standards, prevent vendor lock-in and generally increase the velocity of innovation in cloud technologies," Lew Moorman, President, Cloud and CSO at Rackspace, said. "We are proud to have NASA's support in this effort.”

"Modern scientific computation requires ever increasing storage and processing power delivered on-demand," Chris Kemp, NASA's Chief Technology Officer for IT, added. "To serve this demand, we built Nebula, an infrastructure cloud platform designed to meet the needs of our scientific and engineering community.”

Rackspace is effectively releasing its own internal tool under an open source license. Rackspace Cloud Files is already available for download over at OpenStack.org, the projects official website. The second component of the project will be a mix of NASA’s in-development cloud computing technology Nova and Rackspace’s similar tool Ozone. The details of this are still being worked out and this second component, Nebula, is not expected to be available until later this year, possibly as late the fourth quarter.

When this is completed, the two organizations behind the initiative along with their partners plan to get the project fully going with dedicated teams and clear goals. 25 companies have already signed to support OpenStack, although they are mainly hardware manufacturers like Intel, Citrix, Riptano, Dell, Cloud.com, AMD and Scalr.