OpenStack.org: RackSpace Open Sources Their Cloud Services Platform, And Gets NASA On Board

Michael Arrington

J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995) and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich... → Learn More

Sunday, July 18th, 2010

Hosting company RackSpace is open sourcing the software behind its cloud storage and computing platforms on Monday, the company is saying. The company is also preparing to launch OpenStack, an open source cloud platform, and will donate the open source code to that project.

NASA is also incorporating technology from the NASA Nebula Cloud Platform into the OpenStack project, says RackSpace.

RackSpace says they want to drive interoperability in cloud services to avoid vendor lock-in, and help create industry standards. More than 25 companies have shown interest in the project, says RackSpace, or are actively working on the code. They include AMD, Citrix, Cloud.com, Cloudkick, CloudSwitch, Dell, enStratus, FathomDB, Limelight, Nicira, NTT DATA, Opscode, Peer 1, Puppet Labs, RightScale, Riptano, Scalr, Sonian, Spiceworks and Zuora.

The code is being released under the extremely flexible Apache 2 license, meaning third parties can redistribute the code, build proprietary software around the code, and distribute it with few restrictions.

Company: Rackspace
Website: rackspace.com
Launch Date: 1998
IPO: July 11, 2011, RAX

Rackspace is a global web host known for their high end managed hosting and dedicated services. The company delivers enterprise-level managed services to businesses of all sizes and kinds around the world, serving more than 14,000 customers in eight data centers worldwide.

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