Rackspace set to ship OpenStack storage, networking products soon

Rackspace has relinquished the reigns of the OpenStack code to an independent foundation and has made significant progress on its own commercial plans.           

At OpenStack Summit Wednesday, one Rackspace exec said the company is getting ready to release in the next few weeks a Block Storage product based on the "Cinder" Block Storage service component of OpenStack.

 "There are two levels of storage and the early preview stuff is going well," said Troy Toman, senior director of engineering for Cloud Compute at Rackspace Hosting. "It'll be coming out in the next few weeks."

Toman also said Rackspace has in preview testing with some large customers a cloud networking product based on the "Quantum" networking component in OpenStack.

"Our cloud network let you create private networks and link clouds together," Toman said during his keynote, noting that Rackspace worked on its implementation with network virtualization expert Nicera, which was recenty acquired by VMware. "It's our own vLAN. You'll see us broaden availability in the next few weeks and that sets the stage for hybrid [clouds]."

On that note, Rackspace is also working to improve the interoperability of its separate public cloud and private cloud offerings and aims to make images from all cloud OS vendors work seamlessly on its cloud platforms. 

The "Quantum" networking component was made available in the "Folsom" release of OpenStack that was made available late last month. 

Toman also pointed to two Java and PHP software develoment kits Rackspce made available this week for OpenStack dvelopers and said the company would be turning more of its attentions to the open soure project now that several of its internal commercial products are reaching fruition.