"We are excited to collaborate with Intel and look forward to working with the OpenStack community to make the world's leading open-source cloud operating system even stronger," said Scott Crenshaw, senior vice president of product and strategy at Rackspace. "We don't create proprietary OpenStack distributions. Rackspace delivers its customers four-nines availability using entirely upstream trunk code. All of the Innovation Centre's contributions will be made available freely, to everyone."
Rackspace founded OpenStack, the predominant open-source cloud software platform, in July 2010 with NASA. OpenStack software controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center, managed through a dashboard or via the OpenStack API. Since it was founded, OpenStack has become one of the fastest growing open source communities in the world, with more than 520 member companies and 27,000 individual contributors across 167 countries. This growth represents a significant market opportunity, as 451 Research estimates that OpenStack revenue will reach $1.26 billion in 2015[1]. Rackspace is the operator of the world's largest production OpenStack cloud and has a deep expertise in managing and scaling OpenStack private clouds both in Rackspace data centers and on-customers' premises.
"This announcement demonstrates our continued support and commitment to open source projects," said Jason Waxman, vice president and general manager of the Cloud Platforms Group at Intel. "Our ongoing collaboration with Rackspace and the OpenStack community represents an ideal opportunity to accelerate the enterprise appeal of OpenStack."
The agreement between Rackspace and Intel includes:
* OpenStack Innovation Center - The center will create the world's largest OpenStack development team. It will be comprised of Rackspace and Intel engineers and will be located at Rackspace's corporate headquarters in San Antonio.
* OpenStack Developer Training - Through this effort, Rackspace and Intel will offer new modules of courseware designed to onboard and increase the number of open source developers actively contributing to the success of the community.
* Joint OpenStack Engineering - Rackspace and Intel will resource OpenStack development, working in collaboration with the OpenStack Enterprise Work Group and community, targeting bug elimination and the development of new enterprise features. The companies will recruit new engineers to participate in OpenStack development.
* Largest OpenStack Developer Cloud- Rackspace and Intel will build and make available to the community two 1,000 node clusters to support advanced, large-scale testing of OpenStack and new features developed through the joint engineering work. The companies anticipate having the clusters available for community use within the next six months.
"The community's goal is to foster collaboration and spur innovation that drives broad adoption," said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. "The depth of experience and community engagement that Rackspace and Intel offer makes this an exciting project, as the code contributions and large-scale testing will benefit everyone who uses OpenStack."
