With so much jargon floating around, it is only natural to confuse cloud computing with managed services, where "something" is delivered as-a-service.
Despite marketers' efforts to explain its concepts, The Cloud evolved by progressively pealing layers from the traditional computing stack which, in just under a decade, allowed users to be less concerned about software or hardware platforms and to concentrate on delivering killer applications to their customers instead. This model made it affordable to deploy services on a public cloud infrastructure provided by a service provider in minutes, rather than weeks or months.
Outside of all the hype, virtualization essentially solved one problem well: "Physical Server Sprawl". However, the technology failed at dealing with the big picture, specifically addressing scalability and manageability requirements; and with a multitude of hypervisor software, virtual machine sprawl became the issue, and the challenge of managing virtual farms was an even bigger problem.
Just like DARPA created the Internet in the late 70's to connect multiple networks, it was NASA this time that needed to connect, manage and support a large number of virtual farms and thousands of virtual machines it needed to handle the processing needs of its various space programs. NASA's engineers quickly realized nothing was available to meet that challenge, so they created one, then open-sourced and released it to the public in July of 2010 jointly with Rackspace as OpenStack®. The Open Cloud is finally here.
More than 200 companies quickly joined the OpenStack project among which are AMD, Brocade Communications Systems, Canonical, Cisco, Dell, Ericsson, Groupe Bull, HP, IBM, Inktank, Intel, NEC, Rackspace Hosting, Red Hat, SUSE Linux, VMware, and Yahoo.
In addition to abstraction and flexibility, both public and private cloud models brought extra benefits like:
- Better performance and seamless integration
- High availability and scalability
- Improved operations and manageability
- Security, governance and compliance
- Cost efficiency and increased business agility
- Energy savings and improved resources utilization
OpenStack adds:
- Support for most hypervisor software, including KVM, Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere and Xen
- Support for commercial public-cloud offerings including Amazon EC2 and Rackspace Cloud
- Multi-tenant configurations, offering unparalleled cross-platfom integration
- Open-source, community developed solutions
Take control with your own private cloud
While a public cloud can afford greater flexibility, with metered resources delivered as-a-service and billed by the hour, a private cloud is built on your own hardware, which puts you in the driver's seat when you need to take control of the entire stack, from the bare metal up.
DetaCloud offers a unique opportunity to deliver these cloud benefits while you detach from vendor lockdown, software, hardware or other dependencies, fundamentally shifting the focus from what hypervisor or platform you use, to what works best for your applications, giving you the confidence and peace of mind to focus on innovation.
Using industry standards, proven methodology and validated configurations, DetaCloud delivers enterprise class private and hybrid cloud solutions built on the market leading OpenStack® open-source technology, allowing you to plug your applications in the platform of your choice, effectively leveling the playing field and restoring your ability to scale in any direction as your business needs change.
