http://www.openstack.org/I just received this email from the cloud computing use-cases mailing list. This sounds like a promising initiative.
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Rackspace today announced the launch of OpenStack, an open-source
cloud platform designed to foster the emergence of technology
standards and cloud interoperability. Rackspace, the leading
specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry, is donating
the code that powers its Cloud Files and Cloud Servers public-cloud
offerings to the OpenStack project. The project will also incorporate
technology that powers the NASA Nebula Cloud Platform. Rackspace and
NASA plan to actively collaborate on joint technology development and
leverage the efforts of open-source software developers worldwide.
openStack will feature several cloud infrastructure components
including a fully distributed object store based on Rackspace Cloud
Files, available today at OpenStack.org. The next component planned
for release is a scalable compute-provisioning engine based on the
NASA Nebula cloud technology and Rackspace Cloud Servers technology.
It is expected to be available later this year. Using these
components, organizations would be able to turn physical hardware into
scalable and extensible cloud environments using the same code
currently in production serving tens of thousands of customers and
large government projects.
It has 2 components: Compute and Storage
OpenStack Compute:
OpenStack Compute is software for provisioning and managing large-
scale deployments of compute instances. It is written in Python, using
the Tornado and Twisted frameworks, and relies on the standard AMQP
messaging protocol as well as the Redis distributed KVS.
OpenStack Object Storage
OpenStack Object Storage aggregates commodity servers to work together
in clusters for reliable, redundant, and large-scale storage of static
objects. Objects are written to multiple hardware devices in the
datacenter, with the OpenStack software responsible for ensuring data
replication and integrity across the cluster. Storage clusters can
scale horizontally by adding new nodes, which are automatically
configured. Should a node fail, OpenStack works to replicate its
content from other active nodes. Because OpenStack uses software logic
to ensure data replication and distribution across different devices,
inexpensive commodity hard drives and servers can be used in lieu of
more expensive equipment.
