Cloud Computing: An OpenStack Primer for IT Executives

Grazed from CIO. Author: Ed Tittel.

OpenStack is an open source cloud computing platform. Designed as an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environment, this project describes itself as seeking to produce a "ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds." OpenStack is also something of a computing industry phenomenon, as more than 200 software, hardware and service companies are involved.

OpenStack emerged from a joint initiative undertaken by Rackspace Hosting and NASA in mid-2010, with a primary aim to permit organizations to offer (or consume) cloud computing services running on standard hardware elements. Early code was a combination of the NASA Nebula cloud computing platform and the Cloud Files platform from Rackspace. Since mid-2010, the project has maintained a regular six-month release cycle and a detailed schedule of release milestones, orchestrated through a semi-annual planning meeting called the OpenStack Design Summit…

The most recent such summit concluded, in Hong Kong, involved more than 3,000 attendees. OpenStack received a big boost in 2011 when the creators of the Ubuntu Linux distribution adopted OpenStack as part of their systems architecture. Since then, other Linux players ? including Red Hat (which offers a specific OpenStack distribution) and Debian (through its Sid distribution) ? have followed suit with OpenStack distributions of their own…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cio.com/article/746397/An_OpenStack_Primer_for_IT_Executives