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Friday, January 22, 2010

Open Source Clouds on the Rise

"Cloud computing has the potential to transform how government agenciestap into IT services, and open source is an underlying technology inseveral of the early government clouds that have been developed... Achallenge for government agencies is determining how one cloud can workwith other clouds and IT systems to provide the same secure, robustinfrastructure that exists with traditional IT environments. Here'swhere agencies may turn to open source, which has the advantage of'openness,' providing flexibility, interoperability, and the potentialfor customization without the risks of vendor lock-in...
Components of the open source software stack that are being used tobuild and manage clouds include the Linux operating system, Eucalyptus(incorporates the Apache Axis2 Web services engine, Mule enterpriseservice bus, Rampart security, and Libvirt virtualization), Datacloud,Nimbus' EC2 interface (lets organizations access public cloudinfrastructures), virtual machine hypervisors, and Zend Technologies'Simple API (can be used for calling a cloud service from multiple clouds;GoGrid, IBM, Microsoft, Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network, and RackspaceFiles all support it).
In an example of how the pieces fit together, NASA's Ames Research Centeris using Eucalyptus, the Lustre file system, Django Web applicationframework, and SOLR indexing and search engine in its Nebula cloud.Standards are still needed to ensure the viability of open source clouds,and reliability and security have to be proven. With those concerns onthe table, the gradual adoption of cloud computing, along with opensource, is the path we're on. Open source can help minimize up-frontinvestment, give agencies control over their clouds, and tap into sharedresources..." More Info

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