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HP: OpenStack v 3 "Folsom" is serious contender

At Oscon 2012, HP Cloud Services Fellow Brian Akers said the next generation version 3.0 OpenStack platform code named "Folsom" is a serious platform and that no one should be laughing at the open stack cloud technology and HP's cloud aspirations anymore
Written by Paula Rooney, Contributor

Some may be laughing at OpenStack technology today but the next version -- "Folsom" -- is a "serious" offering, Hewlett Packard Fellow Brian Akers said at OSCON 2012.

During his conference opening keynote, Akers, a key architect on the Drizzle database project who was hired by HP Cloud Services, said the "Diablo" release of OpenStack, a version 1.0 release, had a lot of issues and the "Essex" release was a version 2.0 that was workable but difficult to install.

TheOpenStack version now under development, 'Folsom" is a version 3.0 release and is "serious," "Interesting," and is "looking very good."

There's still a lot to be done, he acknowledged. OpenStack still needs a number of pieces, such as account maintenance, load balancing, orchestration and monitoring, Akers said.

But make no mistake: these gaps will be filled, noting that HP has contributed significantly to the security and scalability of OpenStack and will continue to help evolve the open source cloud platform.

What OpenStack does have is momentum, he noted. More than 175 companies including HP, IBM, Dell and Red Hat are part of the OpenStack Foundation. 

"Minshare is what matters [and]the mindshare of OpenStack is huge now," he said. "You can fix the technology. Every single problem can be fixed ... minshare is what matters now and mindshare is there right now.

"We can fix the [OpenStack] technology," he said, noting that the platform needs to be revved to be continuously deployable and the foundation needs to get the API right, but they will be solved. "It's not a big deal."

"OpenStack is being laughed at," he noted, citing the underdog adage that has been true of Linux and other leading open source technologies. "That's not a bad thing."

HP is a leading contributor to OpenStack and no one should doubt its ability to compete against Amazon in this space, he added, noting that the 300,000-employee company runs huge data centers and has more experience with the enterprise than all of the top public cloud platform providers today. 

Service provider Rackspace is a co-founder of OpenStack and will soon launch its OpenStack platform. 

 

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