ElasticStack has been working on an open stack of software to help service providers and organizations start up their own clouds since 2008. The company has seen some success in Europe and recently (June 2010) entered the U.S. market.
ElasticStack is offering a turnkey set of tools that includes a brandable control panel and billing system, cluster management API making it possible for customers to customize how an ElasticStack Cloud is seen by users and a KVM-based virtual server environment. In essence, all a service provider or large company needs to do is add their favorite industry standard systems, stir and they have their own cloud computing environment.
Snapshot analysis
This trend reminds me of several others. Over time, UNIX, Windows, client/server computing, Linux and now cloud computing have been presented as the best way to build interoperable, vendor agnostic computing environments that avoid vendor lock-in. Unfortuantely, this effort like those that preceded it are fragmented into competing campss.
A while back I posted OpenStack, the battle to create open systems once again? to discuss my take on OpenStack’s introduction of multi-vendor development and deployment environments for cloud computing. In that post, I mentioned that OpenStack was not alone in this effort. VMware, Amazon, Microsoft and Eucalyptus came immediately to mind. Now, ElasticStack joins the group.
A quick review of what the company is doing led me to the conclusion that ElasticStack’s tools would be very useful to hosting companies thinking about offering their own cloud services or large companies wanting to build their own in-house, on-premise private clouds. That being said, ElasticStack needs to do quite a bit to build their own brand workwide.
