Rackspace pencils in mid-August for UK launch of OpenStack

Rackspace global rollout of open-source platform for cloud computing reaches UK on 15 August

Rackspace is formally launching its OpenStack open-source infrastructure-as-a-service platform in the UK in mid-August.

The UK launch is part of a rolling programme of launches that the company is doing at its datacentres across the world over the next six months, starting with the US today and the UK on 15 August. The rollouts include both the broad platform, as well as some of the various components that it offers.

Built largely in Python, OpenStack is billed as a "cloud operating system". It was pioneered by web hosting company Rackspace and the US space agency NASA, said Nigel Beighton, vice president of technology at Rackspace.

"NASA had a grid computing platform that formed the cloud service elements of a basic service it called Nebula. In 2010, we added cloud storage, which is what we call cloud files, and turned over all that intellectual property to the OpenStack Foundation," said Beighton.

Over the past couple of years, the Rackspace-led Foundation has progressively implemented and integrated a number of services into the platform.

"What you get with OpenStack is, first of all, cloud servers. So you can spin up a virtual server for anybody implementing OpenStack. Then, there is object storage, which is commonly known as Swift. Effectively you are able to drop in an S3-type service by dropping in object containers," said Beighton.

He added: "You then have virtual storage and there is a networking piece as well, which enables people to build multi-tiered networks that can be simply specified."

Indeed, VMware's recent acquisition of Nicira reflects the rising importance of virtual networking to cloud computing, to enable networking resources to be scaled up (and down) for individual needs or clients accordingly.

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Rackspace pencils in mid-August for UK launch of OpenStack

Rackspace global rollout of open-source platform for cloud computing reaches UK on 15 August

The formal launch on 15 August will open up Rackspace's service, which had been run in beta by a limited number of major organisations, to all-comers.

"On the 15th, we will launch the cloud service element, the cloud databases, the control panel and that will be quickly followed over the next couple of months by the block storage side of it," said Beighton.

"The key for cloud users interested in OpenStack is that they get to use it effectively and get to understand how the APIs for all the ones that don't want to get locked in and want to be able to use multiple other clouds," he added.

OpenStack has been promoted heavily by Rackspace in recent months.

"It's everything from the control panel to database-as-a-service to compute to storage to networking," said Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier. "For the past year and a half, once we had launched OpenStack and rewritten our cloud to run on it, we are finally ready to release it to the world on a broad basis."

Current users of OpenStack include HP, AT&T, Korea Telecom and Deutsche Telekom, which created a "business marketplace" based on OpenStack.

OpenStack is completely open source, added Beighton, which means that any individual, organisation or IT supplier could take the code and re-engineer it for their own purposes – provided they abide by the open source licence.

While development has been led by Rackspace, OpenStack is run by an elected foundation which, crucially, also owns the intellectual property around OpenStack – not Rackspace or any other vendor.