OpenStack recently strengthened their new cloud open source platform by introducing new application features to their existing cloud framework. The announcement was made last Thursday; the OpenStack upgrade will now include a new dashboard that will include a new service monitoring and user authentication security system called the Active Directory.
NASA and Rackspace were the prime movers for OpenStack when it was founded in July last year. It was established to race with Eucalyptus System, Amazon’s Web Services and Nimbula, the architects for AWS’ EC2 for the cloud market. To further strengthen OpenStack’s position in the cloud three key startup businesses partnered with them; it included Piston Cloud Computing, Nebula and Cloud.com. The three startups have adopted OpenStack’s private cloud offerings.
Chris Kemp, a former NASA CTO left his former company to concentrate with the Nebula project, an appliance business that is working with their private cloud platform using OpenStack software.
Today, OpenStack has built a popular following from their cloud open source code software. This project has given them giant partners like Dell, Citrix Systems, and Cisco; HP also later announced of their plans to adopt OpenStack for their cloud-based upgrades. In fact, HP is scheduled to sponsor the OpenStack Summit in Boston this coming October 3. These strategies and plans were announced by HP’s Chairman, Ray Lane.
To keep up with the demands from their partners, OpenStack has just released their new and fourth application known as Diablo. This new feature is expected to make user implementation of the cloud enterprise system very easy and user friendly.
Part of its newest feature now include an OpenStack monitoring dashboard that can be accessed by IT and business mangers to check and examine the cloud’s health. This feature is at par with Amazon’s CloudWatch that also offers a health monitoring dashboard.
Nebula representatives are the one’s responsible for this new feature for OpenStack. With this new feature it will be very easy to provide graphical reports on operations and services Web-based system, said Devin Carlen, project technical lead and VP of engineering at Nebula.
There is still another twist to their new application Diablo, which is the Keystone Rackspace project. This new feature will offer an integrated means of authentication for users using OpenStack through Microsoft’s Active Directory and LDAP directories. This new feature will answer the issues on merging traditional directories by incorporating them into the new private cloud-based platform.
Still another key feature is their allocated scheduler, which will allow multiple users to access the virtual machines at the same time from any geographical location. The OpenStack system will also be highly scalable to allow data storage backup in cases of power shortages and failures.
