IBM PowerVC is a product that lets you do cloud type management of your IBM power system's servers. This is based on an open source product called OpenStack. OpenStack is one of the most sought-after open source products in the world. For your purposes, learning OpenStack would mean learning cloud computing in a non-proprietary manner. Let's look at an overview of what OpenStack is. OpenStack is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists working to produce a ubiquitous Infrastructure as a Service open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. The OpenStack software is designed to control large pools of server, storage, and networking resources throughout data center. OpenStack, as we've mentioned, is open source software that's released under the terms of the Apache license. The OpenStack Foundation oversees the global OpenStack project through community membership and sponsorship. IBM via Red Hat is an active member and a Platinum sponsor. For more information about the foundation, just go to openstack.org/foundation. You can see some other key sponsors here, too. The goal of the OpenStack Foundation is to serve developers, users, and the entire open infrastructure ecosystem by providing a set of shared resources to build community, facilitate collaboration, and support integration of open source technologies. Primary activities include organizing large scale test infrastructure, community management, and bringing together more than 20,000 open infrastructure enthusiasts each year at global events like the Open Infrastructure Summit, formerly called the OpenStack Summit. I like to think of OpenStack as the operating system for your entire data center. Now what do I mean by that? When you buy a new switch or a router, for example, you can log into a switch, access its operating system, perform configurations like VLAN or other ACLs, and so on. As you've learned in this course, the operating system is your interface to talk to that specific hardware. Now imagine an operating system from which you can install new operating systems on some servers, configure storage from storage controllers, configure network parameters or networking switches and routers, all from one dashboard. That's what I call the operating system for your entire data center. As you can see, such a system should, by definition, be scalable. When OpenStack first started, one of their key design principles was simple to implement and massively scalable. Most open source projects claim to have the simple design philosophy. In the case of OpenStack, they really mean it. You can view OpenStack as a collection of software projects that enterprises or service providers can use to set up and run their cloud compute and storage infrastructure. Now brief look into its history. Rackspace and NASA were the key initial contributors. Rackspace contributed their cloud files platform code to power the object storage part of OpenStack, while NASA contributed their Nebula platform code to power the compute part. OpenStack now contains a global software community of developers and is used by corporations, service providers, researchers, and enterprise data center administrators and managers. I mentioned a collection of software projects. Here are the key projects of OpenStack. It's hard to remember the project names on first sight, but we'll introduce some of them here. As we go along, each of these names will become more familiar to you. The first key project, which deals with computing, that is, managing the physical server and virtualization on top of it and all the virtual machine management tasks is called Nova. Then we have Keystone, which is responsible for authentication and authorization tasks. That is, it determines which user has access to a project in your cloud and which user can do what. Then we have the project which manages networking related stuff called Neutron. Similarly, we have a project called Cinder, which manages block storage attachments to the compute machines. We'll talk more about other projects as we go along. [MUSIC]
