Internap Adds Visibility To OpenStack

Internap, Atlanta based high performance IT infrastructure provider, today announced the launch of their public cloud storage called Internap XIPCloud Storage. It is right now in beta and it is expected to be publicly available shortly. With this announcement, Internap expands the IT services portfolio they offer to organizations of all sizes, small businesses to multi-nationals. Internap XIPCloud Storage relies on the company’s proven Performance IPTM technology and provides a high-availability solution backed by a 100% Service Level Agreement (SLA).

What is interesting about this announcement?

The interesting part about this announcement is that Internap XIPCloud Storage is based on OpenStack (see previous CloudAve coverage), the open source infrastructure project unveiled by Rackspace and NASA with the support of 40+ companies. The new service will utilize OpenStack’s Object Storage software, designed to enable a highly- scalable and redundant public cloud solution that can store petabytes of data. Essentially, this is the first public production deployment of Openstack outside of Rackspace and NASA. OpenStack Object Storage is nothing but the code behind Rackspace’s Cloud Files.

Intenap XIPCloud Storage has an advantage over Rackspace Cloud Files because it uses OpenStack Bexar version of the code. This allows “unlimited” object size compared to Cloud Files’ 5 GB limit. I am sure Cloud Files will eventually adapt the Bexar code and remove the 5 GB limitation. For the time being, Internap’s public cloud storage has the advantage in the comparison. Internap feels that it is easy to build differentiating services on top of OpenStack so that they don’t have to compete in terms of pricing. This clearly validates the open federated cloud ecosystem idea I have been promoting here in this blog.

Does it mean OpenStack is ready to rock the world?

No, not yet. If you were following the field closely, you will remember that the OpenStack Object Storage codebase came from Rackspace’s Cloud Files, a system that was already in production even before OpenStack came into existence. OpenStack project has taken this mature code and added some advanced features like removing the limitation on the object size, etc. and made it more useful. It is no surprise if some organization uses the Storage code from OpenStack for production level deployments. However, the compute code is not mature yet and OpenStack is expected to release a production ready version sometime this year. We have to wait for this release before we get excited about the onslaught of OpenStack on the cloud infrastructure players.