Red Hat Releases Preview Version of Open Stack Distribution

hypnosec writes "Red Hat has announced the availability of a preview version of its OpenStack Distribution that would enable it to compete with the likes of Amazon which is considered one of the leaders in infrastructure-as-a-service cloud services. The enterprise Linux maker was a late entrant into the OpenStack world where players like Rackspace, HP and Internap have already made their mark. Red Hat's OpenStack distribution enterprises can build and manage private, public, and hybrid infrastructure-as-a-service clouds. These companies will not only be competing with the likes of Amazon, but will also be competing against themselves to get a bite out of the IaaS cloud. What started as a project has quickly developed into an open source solution that enables organizations to achieve performance, features and greater functionality from their private and/or public clouds. The announcement of OpenStack Foundation acted as a catalyst toward the fast-paced development of the platform."

Re:Distributed, libre cloud?

[vlm]

I'd like to see an open, user-driven, distributed cloud where all data is encrypted at a low level, so participants in the cloud don't know what specific data is on their computer: just how much space it is taking up.

Freenet, which has been around since the 90s or so?

The killer with those architectures is pruning. How do you know when the info is no longer needed? Well you toss out the least recently requested data. This leads to really antisocial behavior like setting up two boxes who do nothing but request each others data over and over.

Another exciting architectural feature is random extremely high latency when fetching.

Finally ideally your fetcher would be content aware and failure tolerant. So if you're missing precisely one packet of a movie file, it doesn't just curl and die, but inserts a single blank frame. mpeg / whatever will work around it.

Summary: We've got what you requested, but we need 1) intelligent pruning 2) some kind of semi-intelligent pre-fetch algorithm 3) fault tolerant and content aware fetcher

I read the Faq for their project

[agristin]

I'd rather use Fedora 17.

From the FAQ:

It supports the Essex version and will support the next rev when released, but this part bothers me:

"What are the requirements for using the preview software?

A: The preview version of the Red Hat OpenStack software only works with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 or higher. You'll need a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription for each server you install with the Red Hat OpenStack software."

It maybe less work than with Fedora 17- but 17 includes OpenStack and has a how to get started (some bash-ing required).

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Getting_started_with_OpenStack_on_Fedora_17 [fedoraproject.org]