The Cloud made of Penguins: Open source goes ‘industrial scale’

Grazed from The Register. Author: Gavin Clarke.

Thanks to projects like OpenStack and the mighty operation that is Amazon’s EC2, open source and Linux are quickly becoming the building blocks of “cloud” computing. OpenStack, which started life in 2010, releases compute, storage, networking and other components under an Apache licence, and it is being adopted by huge companies such as telecom giant NTT in Japan and IT behemoth Hewlett-Packard in its fledgling cloud.

Amazon EC2 runs tens of thousands of Linux servers, providing – among other things – storage, with 762 billion objects housed last year following growth of 200 per cent. 2012 will see the number of objects grow again. Open-source clouds – and we’re talking platform and infrastructure-as-a-service rather than hosted email or collaboration – currently have closed-source efforts such as Microsoft’s Windows Azure encircled and outnumbered…

Interestingly, HP went with OpenStack rather than Azure, despite having first signed on the dotted line with Azure in 2010, with the promises of appliances and services that – to our knowledge – still have not appeared to this day. Now, with the middleware APIs and the Linux kernel well-established, the attention should now move to new areas – management frameworks, storage tools and software defined networking, according to the Linux Foundation…

Read more from the source @ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/05/open_source_linux_cloud/