Clouds Open Up, Benefit Clients

The cloud industry is poised to enter a new era of transparency and competition courtesy of the open source movement and the help of large players such as RackSpace, Dell and Citrix. After some jostling over which standard is best, the OpenStack foundation has recently emerged as the pre-eminent open source cloud, which freely provides the code for the major products that sit on top of the physical layer: compute, storage and image service.

It makes it easier and faster for clients and service providers to roll out cloud services, according to industry practitioners. There are over 135 companies contributing to the project but it has mainly been driven by founding members cloud provider Rackspace and space agency NASA, which developed its own cloud products for use internally and among the science community...