Dreamhost has built a public cloud service called DreamCompute that is built on OpenStack, the open cloud infrastructure. The new infrastructure as a service (IaaS) shows how a federated, universal cloud shows market promise to give customers a greater choice from open and proprietary offerings.
Dreamhost, a longstanding hosting provider, has over the past few years been active in OpenStack. Its participation falls in line with its development of an open source, next-generation storage service called Ceph that is compatible with offerings from the likes of Rackspace and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Ceph serves as a core aspect of DreamCompute as does Nicira’s network virtualization platform. Nicira is the network virtualization technology provider that VMware acquired this summer for $1.2 billion. Nicira is a core networking technology in OpenStack. DreamCompute also provides API compatibility with the OpenStack APIs, including Nova Compute, Quantum Networking, and Cinder for block storage.
DreamCompute is a noteworthy development for OpenStack, the open infrastructure that anyone can use to build their own cloud. It is further proof that the movement is gaining momentum. Last week, Cloudscaling announced it would offer compatibility with the Google Compute Engine APIs. OpenStack is the largest open source project in the world. It has more than 5,600 individual members representing more than 850 organizations in 88 countries. The OpenStack Foundation has secured $10 million in funding from members and from 21 platinum and gold corporate sponsors. The group’s twice a year event begins today in San Diego.
