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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Dell Cloud for U.S. Government builds on Red Hat’s OpenStack implementation and Dell’s platform-as-a-service component will be based on Red Hat’s OpenShift. That choice of OpenStack as basis is interesting because Dell recently nixed plans to offer an OpenStack-based public cloud but also said its private cloud offerings would still draw upon the OpenStack open-source stack. For the record, Red Hat’s OpenStack is technically still in preview although it’s likely that general availability will be announced this week at its Red Hat Summit.  OpenShift became generally available yesterday.

The importance of security clearances

The vendor is working to attain FedRAMP security certification for its platform. Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program accreditation makes it easier for a company to deploy its technology across agencies and organizations without having to repeat a lot of the processes. Autonomic Resources and CGI Federal were the first vendors to get the FedRAMP nod. Amazon’s GovCloud made the grade in May and Hewlett-Packard and Lockheed got the nod last week. More than a dozen providers are expected to clear the FedRAMP hurdle by year’s end with many more expected to do so by 2014 when FedRAMP certification becomes mandatory.

These Dell clouds were designed to meet specific requirements for government work, a company spokesman said. There will be a FedRAMP-grade multitenant cloud on the docket as well as an implementation that meets Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) requirements for protecting data security — an interesting concept at a time when the NSA’s PRISM surveillance scandal roils around us.

Still, there’s a ton of money at stake — the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) estimates that a quarter of the total $80 billion government IT budget is moving to the cloud. That, and the fact that every legacy IT provider and a raft of newer cloud companies are all angling for action, means the competition for this business will be fierce.

Photo courtesy of Flicker user chucka_nc

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Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel

Intel, Dell (two other vendors) and West Summit Capital kicked off initial Series A closing announced in January.

In a statement, Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel said the new cash infusion will help the company integrate its Fuel configuration and deployment technology with “key players in IT.”

Fuel is a toolset that Mirantis open sourced in March. At that time, Ionel described it as the company’s “secret sauce — the automation library — that we used to set up some of the largest OpenStack adopters — Paypal, Webex, The Gap and others.”

As I reported last year, Mirantis made its name mixing and matching the best OpenStack components from multiple vendors into cloud solutions for customers.

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In a sense, it’s about time this happened. Ubuntu rival SUSE has been offering enterprise-level support for Ceph since November last year, as part of its SUSE Cloud OpenStack distribution. And Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth invested $1 million in Inktank a few months before that.

Still, better late than never: Ubuntu is a – if not the – leading OpenStack distro, and Ceph has been integrated with it for some time, so plenty of users will find this useful. According to the companies, Ubuntu Advantage subscribers will be able to get support for Ceph from both Canonical and Inktank.

Enterprise customers will of course mostly be dealing with a long-term support (LTS) version of Ubuntu, so the focus here is on version 12.04, but other releases will be supported for 18-month periods as opposed to 5 years. So those paying customers who are playing with the Ubuntu 13.04 interim release, which is more tightly aligned with OpenStack than ever before, should also find their support needs met.

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The research facility is trying to develop a private cloud to serve 11,000 physicists around the world and, with the Large Hadron Collider currently being upgraded, the amount of data that will need to be managed is set to see a major increase.

CERN has been testing various virtualization and cloud options over the last few years and, according to infrastructure manager Tim Bell, it’s currently got two environments: around 3,000 virtual machines running in a high-availability configuration on Microsoft’s System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM); and three OpenStack deployments, the main one running around 500 or 600 hypervisors. The plan is to scale up to 15,000 hypervisors, with 150,000 VMs, by 2015.

Bell, who has spoken at several of the OpenStack Summits over the past few years and is a member of  the OpenStack board, explained that the OpenNebula trial was stopped at the start of this year. He said “all those resources are now part of the OpenStack environments”:

“We’ve been investigating how to use cloud technology for physics. We did a test with OpenNebula and ran various scenarios. It was useful to explore the concepts of cloud computing but, when we were looking at deploying at scale, we wanted an environment where we wouldn’t be the largest. We didn’t want to be pushing the limits of scalability ourselves; we wanted to be building on the works of others.

“We also wanted to take advantage of the ecosystem – load balancing, orchestration and so on. These things float around OpenStack or become part of it, and that’s part of the momentum of that as a solution.”

One of the key OpenNebula deployments had been within CERN’s engineering department – an OpenNebula cloud running on top of VMware. However, as OpenNebula project director Ignacio Llorente confirmed to me today, that department is now using vCloud instead.

But, as regards Bell’s explanation for why CERN has dropped OpenNebula, Llorente hit back very hard indeed:

“They have never been our largest deployment. We have much larger deployments in several telcos. They only ran 16,000 VMs on 400 physical boxes. Regarding the technical aspect, I do not agree OpenStack has a wide ecosystem. The ecosystem around the Amazon API is much wider, and as far as I remember CERN used our AWS API implementation.

“Moreover OpenNebula better meets the requirements of cloud deployments for HPC and Science regarding job orchestration, load balancing … We have a very wide user base in research and supercomputing: FermiLab, European Space Agency, SARA Dutch Supercomputing Center, NASA Langley, CESGA, DESY, NCHC, CSIRO, KIT, PIC, CESCA, CHPC, most of the cloud sites at the European Grid Initiative…

“As far as I know this movement was not a technical issue, it was a hype-driven decision… The management of the cloud project at CERN changed and the new management decided to leverage the hype around OpenStack. Although we spent a lot of time helping CERN build its cloud, they never contacted us to comment about this movement.”

Harsh words. So, did CERN buy into hype or did it make a smart move? Such is the nature of experimentation that we can’t draw a firm conclusion at this point. All we do know for sure is that OpenStack has a significant amount of momentum in Europe right now and OpenNebula – a more mature stack with a stronger local heritage, remember – isn’t going down without a fight.

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So what makes Dresden-based AoTerra such hot property? The fact that it does just that: heats properties. And these are no ordinary heaters. These are heating systems with servers inside them.

AoTerra’s system comprises a server unit connected to a heat exchanger or heat pump, which is in turn connected to the property’s ventilation system, and a hot water tank. It’s intended for new-build and renovated properties that meet modern energy efficiency standards and, according to the company, efficiency is nearly 100 percent (the company also only uses “green” energy for its devices).

Each system has a broadband connection and forms part of a distributed, OpenStack-based data center. The result is AoCloud, which offers compute, block storage and object storage (all are currently in beta). Customers can be pretty sure their cloud is as green as it gets, but there are other benefits too – the distributed nature of the cloud could mean low latency, and AoTerra is touting security as a plus, too.

AoTerra is also involved with a couple of Europe-funded projects, namely LEADS (trying to create a “data-as-a-service” model on top of geographically distributed micro-clouds) and ParaDIME (trying to making computing more energy-efficient).

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the idea of using waste heat from data centers to heat homes — London’s Telehouse West data center was going to do that, although the local council never set up the distribution network and the housing development never got built due to the recession. Telus is planning something similar in Vancouver. But those were about data centers heating nearby developments; what AoTerra has come up with is a step beyond.

Property owners or developers pay €12,000 for the system (about the same as a normal heating system), but they don’t have any ongoing operating costs – from that point on, they get free heating and hot water. And AoTerra gets out of having to pay for air conditioning, which is a pretty major chunk of the cost of running a traditional data center.

Overall, AoTerra claims, its distributed data center costs the company about a tenth of the normal set-up costs for a data center, with its running costs being less than half and CO2 emissions around a third. The company has only been going for a year, and it already has 20 AoHeat devices with over 200 servers installed. It had a turnover last year of €100,000, and has already signed contracts worth €400,000 this year.

AoTerra says it’s negotiating €1.6 million worth of contracts at the moment, and has another €3.1 million worth in the pipeline. This year it wants to sell 100 AoHeat devices, and next year 500 – at that point, it would be one of Germany’s biggest cloud providers. They need the crowdfunding investment to grow the team to match demand, they say.

I’ve yet to see one of these units in action, but the pitch is intriguing to say the least.

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OpenStack Foundation COO Mark Collier (L) and Executive Director Jonathan Bryce (R)

“There’s more tolerance for early adoption around this technology in the U.S. We’ve seen that not just in Europe, but in Asia as well. In the last few months we’ve definitely seen people picking it up in other countries, and in some cases it means they’re getting the benefit of all those early adopters.”

How about numbers? Well, that’s tricky – because OpenStack is open-source, there’s no way of nailing down precisely how many organizations and providers are using it. However, some big hitters are certainly getting publicly behind it.

Marquee adopters

CERN, the European nuclear research organization that runs the Large Hadron Collider, is one of them. Although it’s also involved with sort-of-OpenStack-rival (although less so these days) OpenNebula, CERN has been toying with OpenStack for a while and is now in the process of rolling out a 150,000-virtual machine private cloud using the platform.

Meanwhile, Deutsche Telekom has been involved with OpenStack for over a year now and has been using it to deliver a security service (along with fellow OpenStacker ClearPath) since March this year. This summer it will move more applications onto its OpenStack-based cloud, Kurt Garloff, head of cloud services engineering at the telco, said at Friday’s event.

And then we have the grand French clouds, Cloudwatt and Numergy, both of which are based on OpenStack.

Why now?

According to OpenStack Foundation COO Mark Collier, the technological requirements of European users are the same as those of U.S. users, but the drivers for adoption are often different, “particularly around data sovereignty.”

“For example, in France there are a lot of companies and policies that create an incentive to have local clouds where the data resides,” he told me, pointing out that the open-source nature of the technology and its resulting widespread take-up by variously-sized outfits meant there were “hundreds of cities where you can get OpenStack.”

Florian Haas is the co-founder of Hastexo, a professional services company that isn’t aligned with any vendor, but has found itself working a lot with OpenStack (it’s a heavy contributor on the high availability front). He reckons Europe has been a slow cloud adopter due to a combination of legal and privacy concerns and a general “degree of conservatism” but, now that cloud adoption is happening, it’s happening on OpenStack:

“Of the big four [stacks] we’re not seeing any OpenNebula, although interestingly there are a few German companies here [at LinuxTag] pushing it hard. We’re not seeing any Eucalyptus. We’re seeing a bit of CloudStack and a massive amount of OpenStack.

“Europe is late to the cloud party, but that creates an interesting situation, which is that much of Europe didn’t go through the AWS uptake cycle. Strangely enough, OpenStack is filling a void, rather than displacing something else.

“A lot of the people we talk to are actually using OpenStack to essentially reorganize their data center. They might have old-style iron-and-wires data centers, or they might be running on proprietary virtual solutions. They’re now considering public and private cloud, and OpenStack is the default.”

With this pace of change — everyone keeps talking about the last 6 months — it will be interesting to see how much further things have gone by our Structure:Europe conference in London on 18-19 September, where we will of course be discussing issues such as stack choice.

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The San Francisco-based company targets new applications that run on its technology but can also run in Amazon and Google public clouds as needed. Juniper is already partnering with Cloudscaling which is using Juniper’s Virtual Network Control in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) feature that maps to virtual private clouds in Amazon Web Services.

The funding, “affirms that customers want more than OpenStack. They want an on-premise, OpenStack-based private or public cloud turnkey system solution that delivers architectural and behavioral fidelity with major public clouds like Amazon Web Services,” Cloudscaling CEO Michael Grant said in a statement.

It’s been a sort of rocky week for OpenStack. On Monday, Dell surprised the ecosystem by deep-sixing plans to roll out an OpenStack-based public cloud.

Cloudscaling closed a $4 million Series A round in September 2011. Company CTO Randy Bias, pictured above right, is an OpenStack Foundation board member, and will talk about issues and benefits of cloud adoption at GigaOM’s Structure Europe in September.

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Nnamdi Orakwue, VP of Dell Cloud

The company’s first public cloud partners are Joyent, ScaleMatrix and ZeroLag. The rationale: Dell customers don’t want to be locked into a single cloud vendor and would like assurances that workloads can be moved as needed if their requirements change or their current cloud is not up to snuff. ZeroLag gives Dell a VMware-based cloud option.

There are two takeaways from the news, Nnamdi Orakwue, VP of Dell Cloud, said in an interview on Monday. “First, private cloud success is our bread and butter there our top priority on the open-source side is OpenStack. The second is multi-cloud management and helping our customers deal with it via Enstratius.” The Enstratius management offering supports more than 20 different clouds.

Orakwue acknowledged that Dell’s cloud strategy has been a work in progress. Late last year, the company said its public cloud would be based on OpenStack and would come out a year later than expected. Today’s news changes that.

Dell may add other cloud partners to the mix later and could take an equity stake in some of them. (GigaOM’s Derrick Harris wrote in 2011 that Joyent would be a smart investment for Dell if it’s serious about the cloud biz.)

On the one hand, Orakwue said Dell will be “platform agnostic,” on the other he said OpenStack is clearly its platform of choice on the private cloud side. You have to wonder if that’s a consolation prize for the OpenStack faithful.

Things are heating up on the public cloud front for sure. VMware is expected to re-announce its public cloud platform – which will run in as-yet-unnamed partner data centers — on Tuesday and the whole topic of public, private and hybrid cloud deployments will doubtless come up at GigaOM’s Structure event in San Francisco next month.

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The topic arose at the clouderati-filled Cloud 2020 meetup in Las Vegas last week (where someone suggested we’ll have a cloud duopoly of Amazon Web Services and Google) and it’s back in the public eye again this week with the general availability of Google Compute Engine. I think we might get an idea how the cloud computing market will play out by looking at the fast-food industry.

The analogy goes like this: Fast food restaurants offer their consumers essentially the same things as public clouds offer their customers – convenience, speed, standardization, flexibility and everything else that comes with not having to prepare a meal from scratch or deploy applications on physical gear. And if all anyone wanted was fast, cheap hamburgers, fries and maybe some sort of chicken sandwich, the more than 33,000 McDonald’s across the world would probably do the trick.

However, when I come to any major intersection in a big city (and even in some small towns), I usually see no less than two national fast food chains taking up corner real estate. If I drive a little down the road, I’ll likely see a few more, and possibly some regional chains thrown in, as well.

Not all hamburgers are created equal, it seems.

Why should cloud computing be any different? If all anyone wanted was a virtual server, they’d probably go with the omnipresent Amazon Web Services. But when features, price, security, network connectivity and related services come into play, it becomes easy to see why there’s such an appetite for more options.

Amazon is to McDonald’s as Google is to …

Amazon Web Services = McDonald’s and Yum Brands rolled into one: AWS is to the cloud what McDonald’s is to fast food. It was the first, it’s the biggest and it’s the best known. All things being equal, there would be no reason for anyone to go anywhere else for cloud computing because AWS delivers reasonable services at a fair price (sometimes downright cheap), is omnipresent and can pretty much handle whatever scale you throw at it.

Only, if we consider the virtual server the hamburger of public cloud, the object store the French fries and the cloud database a chicken sandwich, AWS starts to look like a lot more than just a McDonald’s. You might look at it more like Yum Brands, the parent company of Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut. The Amazon platform is about far more than just machine images and some standard storage and database features. It has myriad services covering everything from configuration to big data, and they’re all designed to integrate tightly with one another — like one of those KFC/Taco Bell combination restaurants that dot the urban landscape.

AWS, like McDonald’s, is the undisputed champion. Source: Wikipedia Commons

Rackspace = Wendy’s: Wendy’s is the No. 2 fast-food franchise in the United States, a title I think Rackspace probably holds in the cloud space (although assessing cloud market share is a little more difficult than assessing fast-food market share). And much like Wendy’s places a premium on the quality of its products, Rackspace places a premium on the quality of its service. CEO Lanham Napier has gone so far as to say it’s “playing a different game” than Amazon.

What he means is that Rackspace doesn’t need to compete with AWS by constantly driving down prices because Rackspace customers value service and will pay for it. Maybe, but the company might take a hint from what’s happening with Wendy’s as it struggles to maintain its No. 2 status against a feisty Burger King that’s largely following the McDonald’s playbook. If market share is important, higher prices aren’t often the best recipe for maintaining it.

The Angry Whopper, like App Engine, probably isn’t for everyone.

Google = Burger King: That cloud version of Burger King nipping at Rackspace’s heels is Google. It already has all the standard fare in servers, storage and databases, but it’s also hipper than the rest (or at least it tries to be), it takes some chances on product design (sometimes to the love-it-or-hate-it extreme) and, like Burger King with the Whopper, what it does well, it does really well. In Google’s case, that’s perform at scale.

If Google keeps adding services and cutting the costs of everything, there’s no reason it can’t become the world’s No. 2 cloud provider — some have already bestowed that honor upon it — and maybe challenge AWS a decade down the road.

Microsoft = Arby’s: Despite Microsoft’s best efforts to market it otherwise, Windows Azure is still largely viewed as a cloud platform for running .NET applications and generally doing all things Windows. Not that that’s a bad thing — a lot of people really like Windows and, by many accounts, Windows Azure is a fine platform. It’s like going to Arby’s: the menu offers a lot of things, but you go for the roast beef.

Joyent, Virtustream, CloudSigma et al = In-N-Out Burger, Culvers, Five Guys et al: These cloud providers, like their analogous restaurant chains, are damn good at what they do and their patrons are loyal. They’re typically designed for maximum performance, maybe security, too, and will play around with new infrastructural or programming components in order to maintain their edge. They might even be the best at certain things and have some major customers (I’ve seen Maseratis leaving the In-N-Out drive-thru), but cost, geography or the desire to get a chicken sandwich, too, limit the number of users they can attract.

Yes, In-N-Out is delicious — and that’s about the entire menu.

VMware = Del Taco: According to my colleage Barb Darrow, VMware’s new VMware vCloud Hybrid Service will “be run from partner data centers and sold by VMware’s channel but managed by VMware.” Del Taco sounds like a Mexican place but also has hamburgers, fries, shakes and even iced coffee. And I don’t know anyone who eats there.

OpenStack = Frozen French fries, or cheeseburger-flavored Doritos: It really depends on who you ask (some would even say it’s like kale). If you’re grilling burgers and cooking fries, you’re essentially trying to recreate the fast-food experience at home. On the bright side, when you’re making the hamburger patties and cooking the fries, you can control how much salt you add and ensure everyone who handles them washes their hands. It might turn out great, but it’s never really the same.

Perhaps I’m being overly pessimistic, but I’m beginning to suspect that OpenStack-based public clouds (of the non-Rackspace( rax) variety) will end up being a lot like cheeseburger-flavored Doritos. In name, they’re like cheeseburgers, but after a few bites you’re left saying, “Hey, Doritos doesn’t make cheeseburgers …”

Everyone else = everyone else: Even after all this, we’re still left a bunch of different cloud providers and a bunch of different fast food chains. You might compare the telcos to Jack in the Box, Carl’s Jr. and Hardees in that they’re big and make money, but they’re pretty much non-factors in the grand scheme of things. Then there are your various web hosts and others, which might compare with some local chain restaurants. And different countries will certainly have their own cloud providers just like they have their own takes on fast food.

In the end, though, it’s just hard to see how cloud computing becomes a two-horse race any more than the fast-food industry is a two-horse race. Sure, there are three clear leaders (with No. 1 having a big lead), but there’s plenty of business to go around because aside from some core similarities, no two providers are the same. And as long as more applications are developed and need a cloud to call home, there will be developers and CIOs with very different ideas of what makes a cloud platform great.

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