First OpenStack Public Cloud Is Hosted By Internap

Managed hosting service provider Internap unveiled its latest cloud offering, a publicly available cloud-computing service based on the open-source OpenStack platform.

The new Open Public Cloud service offers customers high-performance, on-demand provisioning and scaling of enterprise computing capacity, Internap said. Open Public Cloud is the first publicly available OpenStack-based cloud environment.

OpenStack Compute foundation

Open Public Cloud is based on Compute, a major component within the OpenStack project. OpenStack provides three core capabilities, including Compute, Object Storage and Networking, as well as a dashboard.

Internap built Open Public Cloud Internap on top of the project’s third version, “Cactus,” released in April. There was a lot of work done to tweak the project to integrate with other Internap products and to add in custom features such as billing and security, Paul Carmody, senior vice president of product management and business development at Internap, told eWEEK.

However, Internap was a “committed member” of the OpenStack project and contributed code for any enhancements that could benefit the broader community, according to Carmody. “We use OpenStack more than any other service provider,” Carmody said.

Rackspace and NASA jointly launched OpenStack in July 2010 to create a vendor-neutral platform that would allow customers to easily move from one cloud service provider to another without being locked in. With most public providers, such as Amazon Web Services, some work is required to rebuild virtual machine instances if the customer decides to switch cloud providers.

The open-source OpenStack project is designed to make the move between cloud hosts seamless for customers and to allow providers to design and run Amazon Web Services-like cloud-computing environments.

Open source route free choice

Many cloud providers have been working to launch their own OpenStack-based cloud, including Rackspace, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and DreamHost. Internap’s offering may be the first but it is unlikely to be the only one for long, as HP’s offering is currently in private beta.

Internap’s has three cloud services, including Open Public Cloud, Custom Public Cloud and XIPCloud Storage. Custom Public Cloud is a VMware-based environment intended for enterprise users. XIPCloud Storage is a storage environment built upon the OpenStack ObjectStorage framework. XIPCloud launched as beta in January and was made generally available over the summer. It was the first major storage deployment using ObjectStorage outside of hosting provider Rackspace.

Internap’s cloud services portfolio provides organisations with some flexibility in migrating to the cloud. They can “dip a toe in the water” with one of the services and migrate the rest over time, Carmody said.

Carmody said Internap has everything customers are looking for from a “strict IP platform perspective” and the company will focus its next steps on integrating additional elements and improving the entire IT experience to make it easy to work with.

As for the overall project, Internap has “made some improvements” to the OpenStack networking code, which will be contributed back to OpenStack, Carmody said. Internap expects to participate in future development efforts for OpenStack’s Networking component, according to Carmody.

It has been a momentous month for OpenStack. Earlier this month, Rackspace spun off the project to an independent foundation to drive future development efforts. Rackspace remains part of the project but actual project governance would rest with the newly created OpenStack Foundation.

Internap initially announced its plans for the Open Public Cloud last May.