News

Rackspace has announced the launch of OpenStack, an open-source cloud platform designed to foster the emergence of technology standards and cloud interoperability.

Rackspace, 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.

“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,” said Lew Moorman, President, Cloud and CSO at Rackspace. “We are proud to have NASA’s support in this effort. Its Nebula Cloud Platform is a tremendous boost to the OpenStack community. We expect ongoing collaboration with NASA and the rest of the community to drive more-rapid cloud adoption and innovation, in the private and public spheres.”

Rackspace and NASA have committed to use OpenStack to power their cloud platforms, and Rackspace will dedicate open-source developers and resources to support adoption of OpenStack among enterprises and service providers. An OpenStack Design Summit hosted by Rackspace was held July 13-16 in Austin, where more than 100 technical advisors, developers and founding members joined to validate the code and ratify the project roadmap.

More than 25 companies were represented at the Design Summit including AMD, Autonomic Resources, Citrix, Cloud.com, Cloudkick, Cloudscaling, CloudSwitch, Dell, enStratus, FathomDB, Intel, iomart Group, Limelight, Nicira, NTT DATA, Opscode, PEER 1, Puppet Labs, RightScale, Riptano, Scalr, SoftLayer, Sonian, Spiceworks, Zenoss and Zuora.

CA Technologies has announced the general availability of five products in its CA Virtual portfolio, which offer comprehensive management capabilities designed to help increase business agility by providing a better way to provision, control, assure, secure and optimize virtual environments.

The five products announced today are CA Virtual Assurance, CA Virtual Automation, CA Virtual Configuration, CA Virtual Assurance for Infrastructure Managers, and CA Virtual Privilege Manager. The company also introduced the CA Virtual Foundation Suite, which combines select virtualization management products at a compelling price point.

Today’s offerings from CA Technologies are designed to help eliminate the VM stall faced by many organizations today.

After virtualizing the “low-hanging fruit,” which typically means the conversion of no more than 20 to 30 percent of physical servers to virtual machines, a variety of factors can conspire to stall progress, including: complex application and infrastructure performance issues, security and compliance concerns, concerns regarding uncontrolled VM sprawl, capacity management complexity, staffing and skill levels.

Many organizations in virtualization stall never manage to virtualize their tier 2, tier 1, and mission-critical systems. Stuck at the first stage on the virtualization maturity curve, these organizations are unable to leverage the entry-level benefits of server consolidation into infrastructure optimization, automation and orchestration, and the promise of a dynamic data center and private cloud.

This in turn means that they fail to realize the full scope of benefits from virtualization: not just cost reduction, but also business and IT agility, management efficiency, market responsiveness, service improvements, and staffing benefits.

CA Technologies today broadened its CA Virtual portfolio by adding a new security solution – CA Virtual Privilege Manager.

The use of virtual environments in data centers has grown rapidly and organizations have begun to use virtualization to help streamline their operations and reduce their operating costs. However, regardless of whether it is a physical or virtual environment, the need for security remains.

Leveraging CA Technologies position as a leader in both virtual systems management and security management, CA Virtual Privilege Manager is designed to control privileged access to virtual environments by securing console access to the hypervisor and managing privileged access to all of the virtual images running on the virtualization server as well as the service console.

Key capabilities of the solution include privileged user password management for the virtual machines and service console, fine-grained administrative access controls to the hypervisor service console, service console hardening, and original user activity monitoring in virtual environments.

CA Virtual Foundation Suite is a combined offering of CA Virtual Assurance, CA Virtual Automation, and CA Virtual Configuration.

The suite, which offers a discount on the individual products, is aimed at the significant proportion of organizations that have embarked on virtualization projects without an enterprise-class management foundation, and as a result, are facing a potential firestorm of poor performance, resourcing gaps, and damaged business confidence. CA Virtual Foundation Suite changes the game by offering the virtualization management foundation that can ease adoption and broaden expansion, as well as help drive both immediate and long-term business results.