Rackspace, a global managed cloud hosting company, has announced a collaboration with Intel Corporation to form the OpenStack Innovation Center. This “center of excellence” would help accelerate the development of enterprise capabilities and significantly add to the number of developers contributing to upstream OpenStack code.
The project will bring together OpenStack engineers from Rackspace and Intel to advance the scalability, manageability and reliability of OpenStack by adding new features, functionality and eliminating bugs through upstream code contributions. The new OpenStack Innovation Center will be located at Rackspace’s corporate headquarters in San Antonio, Texas.
“We are excited to collaborate with Intel and look forward to working with the OpenStack community to make the world’s leading open-source cloud operating system even stronger,” said Scott Crenshaw, senior vice president of product and strategy at Rackspace. “We don’t create proprietary OpenStack distributions. Rackspace delivers its customers four-nines availability using entirely upstream trunk code. All of the Innovation Center’s contributions will be made available freely, to everyone.”
The agreement between Rackspace and Intel includes:
- OpenStack Innovation Center – The center will create the world’s largest OpenStack development team. It will be comprised of Rackspace and Intel engineers and will be located at Rackspace’s corporate headquarters in San Antonio.
- OpenStack Developer Training – Through this effort, Rackspace and Intel will offer new modules of courseware designed to onboard and increase the number of open source developers actively contributing to the success of the community.
- Joint OpenStack Engineering – Rackspace and Intel will resource OpenStack development, working in collaboration with the OpenStack Enterprise Work Group and community, targeting bug elimination and the development of new enterprise features. The companies will recruit new engineers to participate in OpenStack development.
- Largest OpenStack Developer Cloud – Rackspace and Intel will build and make available to the community two 1,000 node clusters to support advanced, large-scale testing of OpenStack and new features developed through the joint engineering work. The companies anticipate having the clusters available for community use within the next six months.
Rackspace founded OpenStack, the predominant open-source cloud software platform, in July 2010 with NASA. As of 2015 it is managed by the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit corporate entity established in September 2012 to promote OpenStack software and its community. More than 500 companies have joined the project, including AT&T, AMD, Avaya, Canonical, Cisco, Citrix, Dell, Dreamhost, EMC, Fujitsu, GoDaddy, Google, HP, Hitachi Data Systems, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Internap, Juniper Networks, Mirantis, NetApp, Nexenta, Oracle, PLUMgrid, Pure Storage, Red Hat, SolidFire, SUSE Linux, VMware, VMTurbo and Yahoo!.
OpenStack software controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center, managed through a dashboard or via the OpenStack API. Since it was founded, OpenStack has become one of the fastest growing open source communities in the world, with more than 520 member companies and 27,000 individual contributors across 167 countries.
