Internap has announced the new public cloud storage service built with Openstack’s software. OpenStack  is a cloud computing project run by Rackspace Cloud and NASA, Rackspace being one of Internap’s major competitors. OpenStack is attractive because users like Internap can build on top of it.

“We saw the OpenStack framework as solving a lot of fundamental large-scale system management and deployment issues that have allowed us to put resources into differentiated areas of the solution,” said Hrastar.

The new product from Internap, the XipCloud elastic storage will be available to beta users starting with this week. The users will be able to log into an online portal to buy storage capacity and network bandwidth. No pricing information is available as yet, but officials did stress that in a few months’ time the product will be available to all users. Internap considered other options including writing its own software or using other cloud management frameworks like Cloud.com, Hrastar said. It went with OpenStack because the company had internal development capabilities that made working with OpenStack easy, he said.

OpenStack is a very young company, just having celebrated its 6-month anniversary.  It has been a very short, but fruitful period in which it attracted some 40 partnering companies for the common goal of ‘fighting the emergence of proprietary cloud stacks and create a standard way to deploy applications and connect clouds’.

In 2010 Rackspace signed a partnership deal with cloud optimizer Akamai so as to create a ‘one-stop shop’ for hosting, cloud and acceleration services’. A partnership between two of the biggest players in the cloud means good news for both companies’ enterprise clients. In order to promote this alliance, related webinars and events are to be held in various cities throughout 2011.

Source: http://www.cio.com/article/655482/Internap_Offers_First_Major_Storage_Service_Using_OpenStack?page=1&taxonomyId=3000