Within the Cloud: Technical Concepts of Cloud Computing - Deploying and Managing a Cloud Infrastructure - page 81

Motherboard and Server Open Compute motherboards and server designs are meant to
have low capital and low operating costs by removing some traditional motherboard features
that are usually unnecessary for servers.
Server Rack (Open Rack) Open Rack is a server rack design standard that integrates the rack
into the design of the data center. It uses a holistic design process that considers the interdepen-
dence of components from the power grid to individual gates on the chips.
Data Center The design of Open Compute data centers is meant to leverage and
maximize the mechanical performance and thermal and electrical efficiency of their
other technologies.
OpenStack
OpenStack is an open-source cloud operating system that is able to control large pools of
storage, networking, and computing resources available in a data center. All these resources
are managed through a dashboard with powerful administrative controls, and users are
empowered to provision resources through a web interface.
OpenStack is a joint initiative released in July 2010 by Rackspace, one of the biggest play-
ers in cloud computing, and NASA, which needs no introduction. The project was intended
to help different organizations offer cloud computing services that run on standard hard-
ware. The early code for the software was a combination of both NASA's Nebula cloud
computing platform and Rackspace's Cloud Files platform. Nebula was designed to provide
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) features, while the Cloud Files platform is predominantly
storage oriented, and both come together to provide both services, which results in the foun-
dation of the OpenStack system we have today.
The project, just like the Open Compute Project, aims to provide a robust cloud computing
platform for both private and public clouds that is interoperable and without vendor lock-in.
However, OpenStack is predominantly an IaaS platform, so it may not it everyone's needs.
OpenStack itself is not a single software package. It is instead a conglomeration of
smaller modules, individual projects that form the basic and advanced features that the
platform provides. It is highly pluggable and can function without the other modules. This
can also be a detriment because some modules will see better development than the others,
but because it's open source, whoever needs one of those modules can simply spend some
resources to develop for it and then share it with the rest of the community. Such is the
beauty of open source.
We will look as these smaller modules in the following sections.
Compute Module (Nova)
Nova is a cloud computing fabric controller, the main portion of an IaaS platform that
controls every aspect of the system. Nova is central to OpenStack's goal of providing cloud
computing services on standard hardware because its architecture is designed to horizon-
tally scale when running on standard hardware. It has no proprietary hardware or software
requirements whatsoever, and it's even backward compatible with legacy hardware systems
and integrates with third-party technologies, making it easy for organizations to jump on