StackOps 360 comprises four main products: a deployment automation tool; a pre-packaged high availability tool for service providers with tight service-level agreements (SLAs) to fulfil; a chargeback facility for those who want to set up pay-as-you-go public clouds or service internal business customers; and an extensible UI development framework called StackOps Portal.

OpenStack abstracted

“We have kind of abstracted the whole OpenStack for a sysadmin who doesn’t have the time to get trained on OpenStack,” COO and co-founder Arturo Suarez explained to me, referring to the StackOps Automation tool.

As for the chargeback tool, Suarez explained that it collects metrics from the layers above the user’s Openstack infrastructure, as well as from that infrastructure itself. “You can create products which are going to be a mix of parameters coming from pure infrastructure – CPU, RAM, etc – or from the applications running on top,” he said. “

The StackOps Portal is interesting, too – eschewing the Horizon UI of OpenStack itself, it is instead an extensible HTML5 rich web application that can be used to manage any public or private OpenStack clouds, regardless of the vendor behind the distro.

Lower learning curve?

Of course, StackOps is far from the only company trying to take the effort out of OpenStack deployments for smaller users. Nebula is a key competitor, although Suarez is somewhat dismissive of that company’s plug-and-play model, which is based around a hardware controller.

“They’re selling the controller. The cost of that solution is really going to be higher because they’re using specific components,” he said. “Nebula also does not have a portal – they have Horizon in a fancy interface, nicely tuned, but it still doesn’t allow you to do some of the operations that you need to do in your cloud, such as managing your catalog.”

Suarez also pointed out that, unlike many competitors, StackOps doesn’t rely on third-party products such as Puppet (see disclosure) or Chef to handle deployments. He claimed there was risk involved with using such tools, especially with Puppet’s ties to VMware, and suggested the learning curve was higher using them than with his company’s package. “You really don’t need to know OpenStack to deploy an OpenStack Cloud with StackOps,” he said.

StackOps certainly talks a good game, and it will be interesting to see how its easy-as-possible approach to OpenStack plays out in the small service provider market, as a counterpoint to the likes of OnApp. The company just opened an office in Austin, Texas, to push harder into the American market. “When it comes to selling cloud, it’s much faster than here in Europe,” Suarez observed.

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Both companies are already corporate sponsors but have applied to join the foundation itself and their applications will be voted on on Monday, according to the agenda for Monday’s OpenStack board meeting. That meeting kicks off the annual OpenStack Summit in Portland, Ore. A Juniper spokeswoman confirmed that company’s application. Ericsson could not be reached for comment.

Update: Mats Karlsson, VP of architecture and process for Ericsson, said the company brings an understanding of networking and telecom  to the table.  Stockholm-based Ericsson had already decided to offer OpenStack-based  services because it liked the open-source ecosystem and sees tremendous traction. The company has services in beta now with commercial roll-out slated for early 2014

Juniper and Ericsson are already corporate sponsors of the open-source cloud effort, but joining the foundation will give them them a seat on the board. the chance to win a seat on the board. It  also requires a funding committment of between $50,000 and $200,000. (The formula is pegged to company revenue per the OpenStack wiki.). Each of the eight top-tier Platinum partners –  AT&T; Rackspace IBM, HP, Nebula, Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu — pony up $500,000 per year and must commit to a three-year tenure.

Other Gold members — the total number is limited to 24 companies — include Juniper rival Cisco Systems, Cloudscaling, Dell, Intel, Mirantis, Piston Labs(see disclosure), VMware and others.

Talk at the summit will no doubt focus on how  new features and functions of the Grizzly release of OpenStack can bring value to customers. Folks will especially be watching for new customer stories. Most of OpenStack’s case studies to date revolve around tech companies —  HP, Intel, Cisco/Webex — all of which are building OpenStack implementations for their own use or which they they want to sell. Now, with Grizzly being the seventh major release of code, it’s time to show OpenStack traction in the world beyond the tech bubble.

This story was updated at 8:45 a.m. PST with Ericsson comment.

Disclosure: Piston is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Bring your own hybervisor

For one thing, it adds support for VMware ESX and “especially” Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors, said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. Up till now OpenStack was largely KVM and XEN focused. Microsoft — one of the few non-OpenStack companies left — helped with HyperV. And VMware, which had been another OpenStack holdout but joined the effort last summer, helped with ESX, said OpenStack COO Mark Collier. Support for multiple hypervisors was a key customer request, both execs said.

Grizzly also attacks (pardon the pun) scalability with a new “Cells” capability that lets customers manage multiple OpenStack compute environments as a single unit. “You expose a single API endpoint and a single control system but underneath that can be a whole nest of clusters,” Bryce said in an interview. And, a new “NoDB” architecture manages how data is shared within an OpenStack environment and reduces reliance on a single database.

Grizzly also expands block storage options. “You can now create OpenStack block storage service that sits in your data center in front of your high-performance storage, your archival storage, your spinning disks and lets you intelligently put your work on different types of storage arrays as needed,” Bryce said. There is also better drivers and support for storage from Ceph, Coraid, HP, Huawei, IBM, NetApp, Red Hat (Gluster), SolidFire and Zadara.

And a new dashboard is there to expose and manage all these new features.

The code is available now, two weeks in advance of the OpenStack Summit in Portland, Ore.

As usual, the foundation touted the number of new contributors to this release — 517, up 56 percent from the last Folsom release.

Wanted: real-world OpenStack users

Here’s the thing though: What folks need to start seeing is real-live end users at companies beyond the tech vendors that support OpenStack as part of their cloud offerings. To claim Cisco/Webex as an OpenStack user does not hold the same weight as saying a huge bank is or a consumer packaged goods company is a customer. To date, Disney has been one charter end user. At this year’s show, Comcast, the country’s largest cable company and an OpenStack member and Best Buy will present case studies.

The other — possibly related — concern is that myriad OpenStack implementations — from Rackspace, HP, IBM, Internap, Cloudscaling, Red Hat, Nebula, Canonical et al — may not be fully compatible with each other.  After all, the pressure will be on for HP to offer features and perks that distinguish its OpenStack cloud from IBM or Red Hat’s OpenStack clouds. Foundation members assure the world that will not be so, but doubts remain.

Many companies are kicking the tires of OpenStack as an alternative or additional cloud to Amazon Web Services. GigaOM Pro Analyst David Linthicum sees three pools of potential OpenStack adopters:  companies looking to deploy a private cloud; companies that don’t want to move to AWS; and companies  that “think they’re protecting themselves by leveraging a standard.”

He added: ”The key concern about OpenStack, as with other standards, is that the providers will move off into their own proprietary directions and thus hurt compatibility.  Clearly most of them won’t wait for the standard to mature to get to the features their users and the market demands. New releases, such as Grizzly, will curtail some of that, but there is not a chance that the standard will move as fast as the distribution providers need them to move.”

To see a demo of the new OpenStack dashboard, check out the video below.

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“We’re a computer systems company,” CEO and founder and OpenStack pioneer Chris Kemp told me recently. “We provide enterprises with a system that includes the standard servers they’re used to buying. They plug it in and can be up in running fast.” The controller yokes together “certified standard” servers from Dell, HP and IBM and ZT into a scalable cloud system, he said.

“To add capacity you just add a rack or two of servers,”Kemp said. The controller handles provisioning of the workload . That plug-in scenario could be attractive to many companies that want to implement cloud with minimal muss and fuss.

PARC has beta tested the Nebula One system for months (running with ZT servers). The research facility is predisposed to OpenStack because it prefers open source technologies and it went with Nebula because it wanted to minimize time and energy spent on set up. “We don’t want to do too much of the plumbing [work.] All that racking and stacking takes a lot of time. We want to push one button and deploy on demand,” said Surendra Reddy, CTO for cloud and big data futures at PARC.

How many OpenStack choices do we really need?

At this point — we’re in year four of the OpenStack journey — the various OpenStack providers — Rackspace, Internap, HP, Cloudscaling, IBM, Red Hat and others need to differentiate themselves both from each other and from other cloud providers using different technologies. Even the most hard-core cloud booster will admit privately that there’s no need for dozens of slightly different OpenStack flavors in this market and some say consolidation is inevitable — the only question is when it will happen.

Nebula One’s ability to plug into existing systems and services adds a comfort factor for many IT buyers that other OpenStack releases lack.

“If you bring software into an enterprise, you end up in a conversation with the server people who want to know what the management system is, then you have to deal with the storage people and then the virtualization people who all hate each other,” he said. But, if you can bring in an appliance that plugs into existing systems, you can minimize the dissonance and blowback from those constituencies. And that could prove valuable.

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Historically, the public and private sectors have had different priorities. The private sector’s profit-centric focus favors businesses that play it safe and shy away from spending on costly infrastructure or risky R&D. The public sector, on the other hand, serves the interests of taxpayers, eschewing commercial interests and taking on public works projects, building infrastructure, and, most relevant to this discussion, funding research and development.

Occasionally the federal government invests in the private sector, with unpredictable results, such as the recent case with Solyndra. However, when the federal government and business approach one another as complementary forces – rather than as producer and consumer – there’s the opportunity for real innovation to flourish and for history to be made.

A history of public-private cooperation

Let’s rewind to the early 20th century: The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), NASA’s predecessor, operated a handful of wind tunnels at the Ames Research Center and Langley Aeronautical Laboratory primarily for use in testing aircraft developed during the World Wars. But if NACA had not also allowed The Boeing Company to make use of its research and test facilities, it would have almost certainly delayed the introduction of the first commercial airliner, the Boeing 247, by over a decade.

To a certain degree that same need for public support of private enterprise still exists today. For instance, were it not for NASA’s financial commitment to SpaceX, we would not be on the verge of an historic new commercial space industry. Similarly, after Sebastian Thrun’s team nabbed the $2 million bounty the U.S. Department of Defense put up for the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge – a race across the desert driven by robotic cars – Thrun ended up leading the Google Driverless Car initiative.

The tradition has moved to the cloud

One of the strongest showcases for how the public and private sectors can work together and create brilliant innovations can be seen in the computer industry, specifically in the realm of cloud computing.

OpenStack has its roots in NASA’s Nebula project, which aimed to create an efficient, self-service cloud platform. As an undertaking of the federal government, NASA Nebula’s budget was drawn from public funds. Executives at Rackspace noticed that Nova, the open-source compute engine at the core of NASA Nebula, complemented their planned open-source storage system. After contacting NASA to explore opportunities for collaboration, the OpenStack project was born in July 2010. Today, OpenStack is the fastest-growing open-source project in history (eclipsing even contributions to the Linux kernel), and has garnered support from industry leaders such as AT&T, Cisco, HP, IBM, Intel and Microsoft, as well more than 500 developers from 850 organizations in more than 80 countries.

What we’re seeing then is the early indication of a new computing ecosystem forming, driven by the foremost innovators in enterprise IT. This isn’t limited to OpenStack, either. Eucalyptus (which started as a publicly funded research project at UC Santa Barbara, by Professor Rich Wolski) is also seeing significant adoption. The ability to customize your cloud to your specification adds value that can’t be overstated. This is especially true in a market where financial services companies, healthcare companies, government agencies, and other organizations need to know exactly where all their information is at all times.

Open source instead of patents

The fact that the open-source model can enable organizations to gain new use from their data and greatly increase the efficiency of their IT operations is proof-positive of the return on the government’s initial investment. Given this success, a similar approach should be considered for other areas of public investment, such as with the patent arena where NASA is once again a model.

Traditionally, NASA attempts to commercialize and otherwise transfer the good work done in its research labs to the public by two means: directly auctioning its patents to the private sector, or maintaining the patents but  actively choosing not to enforce them if doing so would impede innovation. NASA claims over 1,200 success stories in this regard, and there’s plenty to show for it. But arguably no single NASA patent has had the same kind of market-disrupting effect that OpenStack has had merely by opening the doors to the community and letting the market drive development and adoption. That’s food for thought.

Consider the more common alternative: Merely licensing federally funded research keeps the resulting technology proprietary, which restricts the possibilities for innovation. And more importantly, the probability of any of the select companies that license the technology succeeding is quite small. Thus the resulting license revenues returned to the government would likely hardly cover the overhead of maintaining the infrastructure to create, manage, and license the patents, and many technologies are not commercialized simply because of the overhead of the process.

A better alternative to patenting technology would be to require that any technology developed by taxpayers – be it hardware or software – would be open sourced. Using a license such as the Apache License or the General Public License, any business or individual could take publicly supported work and  download, share, modify, and remix it. The result would be a new wave of innovation, as private companies build better companies based on public sector research.

The patent system, patent reform, and the government’s approach to technology transfer are all large, intricate and nuanced topics – too intricate and nuanced to go into here. That being said, let’s not allow success stories like OpenStack to become exceptions. When “open” goes from being a buzzword to the default way our government fuels innovation, the sky will be the limit.

Chris C. Kemp, CEO of Nebula, is a former CTO of NASA and co-founder of OpenStack. Follow him  @kemp

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Andrews has a great OpenStack pedigree. He was also formerly CEO of ANSO Labs,  the NASA spinoff, where he worked with Kemp and the rest of the team behind the Nova compute engine underlying OpenStack.

ANSO was acquired by Rackspace in February, 2011 and Andrews worked on that company’s Cloud Builder program while continuing to contribute to OpenStack. In fact, Andrews is not totally new to Nebula: He was one of the half dozen or so former ANSO people at Rackspace who decamped to Nebula last July.

Two months ago, Nebula netted $25 million in funding from Comcast Ventures and two months ago to fuel its push toward launch. Other OpenStack cloud offerings from Rackspace itself, from HP, Internap, and others are already available.  Nebula’s Kemp has characterized Nebula’s take is to provide an easy-to-deploy but fully enterprise-class cloud.

Last September, Kemp said Nebula will offer sort of a cloud appliance that companies can plug their services into to get up and running fast. Other OpenStack clouds — from Red Hat or Canonical — for example, will be more suited to hard-core techies who want to customize their clouds, he said.

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With the funding secured, one of the first orders of business is to expand the private beta which launched in March in select — and unnamed — biotech and financial services companies, Kemp said in an interview.

“We provide a device that they can plug their services into and, boom, they’re going,” he said. Some of the other OpenStack clouds — such as those from Red Hat or Canonical — he said, will be more suited to hard-core techies that want to customize their clouds. Indeed, OpenStack clouds are starting proliferate with Rackspace, Internap, Hewlett-Packard , Piston Cloud (see disclosure), SUSE and other companies all fielding their own implementations.

Nebula, now with just under 60 employees, is in hiring mode, seeking system level engineers, product managers and others. “We’ve never really stopped recruiting,” Kemp said. Indeed. Just a few weeks ago, Nebula landed 7 developers from Rackspace, a fellow OpenStack collaborator and, to some degree, competitor.

Nebula will also move into a new Mountain View, Calif., facility since it’s bursting out of its current Palo Alto headquarters in the former Facebook office, Kemp said.

Comcast Ventures managing director Louis Toth said Nebula is particularly intriguing because of its management team — Kemp was formerly CTO of NASA and is one of the principal OpenStack architects — and its cloud deployment model. “The great thing about the Nebula Controller is you can take it and off-the-shelf white boxes and in a relatively short time set up a cloud and create hosted services for your user base,” he said. That’s an attractive model for both enterprises and small and medium businesses without a lot of IT resources.

Nebula, however, is coy about its total funding — it never disclosed how much it raised in its Series A round in July 2011.

Disclosure: Piston is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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The company’s name, Rackspace Hosting, remains unchanged, but a new logo and the rebranding acknowledges how the IT market — or at least the perception of the IT market — has changed in the era of cloud computing.

This may be a cosmetic move, but it’s important nonetheless and comes the day Rackspace is slated to announce its second quarter earnings.  The company, with OpenStack in its quiver, now faces off with Amazon in the public cloud sector and with its own partners, Microsoft and VMware, that have cloud aspirations of their own, not to mention a fleet of other OpenStack purveyors including Hewlett-Packard and Internap. (OpenStack, which proponents are pushing as “the Linux of the cloud” is getting some traction. Ebay is working with Nicira on an OpenStack cloud, for example.)

Rackspace CMO Suaad Sait views the rebranding as an extension, rather than a replacement of the company’s current mantra of ”fanatical support.”

Rackspace remains committed to providing deployment choice — on-premises, private, hybrid and public cloud options are all available, Sait said in an interview Monday.

“Grey hairs like me remember companies looking for hosting services. Today, companies look for cloud services. Both are back-end IT infrastructure — it’s all hosting but described in a different way,” he said.

Rackspace,  San Antonio, TX., is at an interesting juncture. It launched the OpenStack open-source cloud effort with NASA just over two years ago and is now transitioning the work into a foundation-led project, ceding some of that control. It has also been challenged  with defections of one key OpenStack partner — Citrix launched CloudStack as an OpenStack competitor in April. It also saw the departure of several key programmers to Nebula a few weeks ago.

But those speed bumps aside, even those who see Amazon as the prohibitive cloud power admit that it’s still early in the war, there’s time for other powers with the right combination of technology and service to emerge.  And even as Rackspace built infrastructure to support the largest IT deployments, Amazon has bolstered the services it — and its partners — offer business customers.

It’s going to be an interesting race.

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The seven developers will continue their work on the OpenStack technology, just at a new venue. The news was confirmed late Monday night by a Rackspace source and by Nebula CEO and Founder Chris Kemp.

Kemp said the personnel move will not impact the community-driven development model of the OpenStack Project, launched by Rackspace and NASA just over two years ago. (Kemp was CTO of NASA at the time.)

“We have seven people joining us, most from that Anso group and most of which I worked with at NASA, so we’re getting them back together,” Kemp said, downplaying any negative impact the migration might have on Rackspace.

“Rackspace is 100 percent ramped up. They’ve hired hundreds of engineers, some from the original Nova project at NASA. They have lots of bright folks,” he said.

These are entrepreneurial “start-uppy” people and Rackspace is a big company, said the Rackspace source, who nonetheless said he would have loved them to stay on.

Rackspace has been busy of late, launching its OpenStack-based public cloud in May and helping set up the OpenStack Foundation that will take over the organization and community development of OpenStack going forward. Starting last fall, there have been several OpenStack implementations coming online — from Internap, Hewlett-Packard and others. The OpenStack forces came together to build an open-source alternative to Amazon in the public cloud arena and VMware, which is trying to ride its virtualization dominance inside corporate data centers into the cloud.

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