collective unconscious of the smarter planet

Wow! Interesting analysis - and crazy implications.

IBM is reportedly talking to Lenovo about selling its x86-based server business to Lenovo and the move would make a lot of sense.

If the talks, flagged in the Wall Street Journal and CRN, sound familiar that’s because Big Blue famously unloaded its PC business to Lenovo in a win-win deal. Lenovo went on to be one of the premier PC makers and IBM focused on software and services and got ahead of trends such as analytics.

To say the IBM’s PC situation then and today’s server state of affairs rhyme would be an understatement. You could argue the situations are the same thing. When IBM offloaded its PC unit, no one saw tablets coming. All IBM knew is that the margins stunk and it wanted higher value wares. The post-PC era was years away.

Fast forward to the server market, which is ripe for disruption. Server sales are doing ok. Companies will have to buy servers right? Of course they will—-for about another three to five years. The reality is servers are going in the following directions:

Specialization by workload. Think IBM’s PureSystems and Oracle’s Exadata efforts.

1. Commodity-ville on the x86 front. You can’t ignore that companies like Google and Facebook go right to white box makers for servers. That reality isn’t so hot for HP, Dell and IBM.
2. You need to own the silicon and intellectual property to really work the server business. IBM’s Power systems won’t go anywhere. Oracle has SPARC. Hewlett-Packard is going processor agnostic with Moonshot, a server line that appears to be innovative.
3. Fewer server buyers. As companies move to the cloud, demand for compute will only increase. The problem. Server makers will be selling in bulk to fewer customers and cloud computing farms. There will only be so many cloud providers. Enterprises large enough to roll their own data centers will be few and far between.

Now let’s talk timing here. The server market won’t unravel tomorrow. It won’t unravel in a few years. But Armageddon will occur and the clock starts ticking right about now.

Why? An enterprise that buys a server right now will start a tax depreciation clock that will run about three years. Once those three years are up and those assets depreciate, the CXO in charge will weigh the costs and benefits of the cloud vs. running a data center, server cluster or whatever. I’ll bet that in three years the cloud will win by a wide margin. Let’s face it—-the cloud is already starting to win and all you have to do is show up at one of Amazon Web Services’ customer powwows to know the writing is on the server rack.

On Thursday, I caught up with Cycle Computing CEO Jason Stowe. There’s a lot to like about Cycle Computing. First, the company is bootstrapped so there’s instant respect. Second, Cycle Computing is at the forefront of making high performance computing clusters for the masses. And third, Cycle Computing has top insurance and pharmaceutical companies as customers. Cycle Computing had massive customers from day one. In other words, Cycle Computing is the real deal, hooked up with Amazon Web Services and will enable a lot of science to happen just by democratizing HPC for smaller companies.

Stowe noted that Cycle Computing is starting to land manufacturing and engineering customers now for its HPC management software and cloud connections. In other words, this HPC for the masses is catching on. If you play this out, there will be fewer servers sold because folks will be using Rackspace, AWS or some other former hardware focused vendor.

Today, it’s big data and research compute driving Cycle Computing demand. Tomorrow every company will have the mathematic models and horsepower to simulate just about anything. You won’t buy your own servers for that computing power.

Stowe said servers will become like wheat fields not things you name. “Today servers are hugged, named and managers know their quirks. There’s an attachment. In the future server clusters will be more like wheat fields. You grow the wheat, reap and sow, eat and replant the seeds. There’s no attachment to the wheat,” said Stowe.

In other words, Stowe’s excellent analogy on servers and meeting compute demand translates into cloud farms and fields. Most companies are going to hit the brakes on new server buying as soon as the depreciation ends and new compute demand has to be met. Play this out and the profit margins on servers aren’t going to look so hot.

IBM sees all of the servergeddon scenarios developing and that’s why it’s ditching its commodity server business now. Let Lenovo, which has the scale and ambition to do the commodity server game, carry the ball from here and duke it out with HP and Dell.

Positive press for OpenStack -

PayPal and eBay are yanking VMware software from some 80,000 servers and replacing it with the free and open-source alternative known as OpenStack, Boris Renski, OpenStack Foundation board member told Business Insider.

Renski is also a cofounder of Mirantis, an OpenStack consultant company backed by Dell and Intel. Mirantis worked with PayPal on the project, he says.

PayPal used a set of tools from Mirantis called Fuel, a PayPal spokesperson told us.

Today Mirantis released Fuel for free to the public. (In geek speak: it was released under the open source Apache 2.0 license). It’s a collection of scripts and software that helps companies deploy OpenStack.

Initially, PayPal is replacing VMware on about 10,000 computer servers. Those servers will go live this summer, Renski said. “The grand vision for project is, over time, they will replace all of their virtual infrastructure with OpenStack, not just PayPal, but PayPal and eBay, together,” Renski said. That’s about 80,000 servers across their data centers, he said.

PayPal has been a big supporter of Open Stack for a while. But this project is still dangerous territory for VMware, as PayPal could become an example of how other enterprise can replace VMware with OpenStack, too.

To be sure, enterprises are not dying to get rid of VMware, even to save money on software license fees. Most of them really love VMware’s software because it’s a reliable way to run lots of different applications on the same computer server.

But cloud wars are coming between different so-called “cloud operating” systems: VMware is up against OpenStack (backed by IBM, HP, Rackspace, Red Hat, others) and CloudStack (another open source project, backed by Citrix). 

Think of this like the desktop operating system wars: Windows vs. Macs vs. Linux.

The ultimate goal for most enterprises is something called a “hybrid” cloud. This means that a company will run some of its apps in its own data center (a “private cloud”) and some of them in a public cloud. They can easily move apps between the two.

More importantly, they can use multiple public clouds. If one provider has problems, they can  quickly switch to another.

Enterprises will have to choose their cloud operating system and the stakes are high. Enterprises will spend $80 billion on cloud computing by 2016, Gartner estimates.

So where does the biggest cloud player, Amazon, fit into all of this? Amazon is the reason for it all. These cloud operating systems rose to compete with it. The idea is to reassure enterprises that they if they choose an alternative to Amazon, they will have lots of cloud computing vendors to choose from, not just one.

A good run-down of the Amazon cloud’s technical features and services.

Selling servers by the hour was a bold idea when the Amazon cloud business launched a few years ago, but it seems quaint compared to all the options for sale today. There are currently 21 products available on Amazon Web Services, and only one of them is the classic EC2 machine, an abbreviation of the full name, the Elastic Compute Cloud. The original S3 (Simple Storage Service) now has cousins like the Simple Workflow Service and SimpleDB, a nonrelational data store. Then there are odder innovations like Amazon Glacier, a very cheap storage solution that takes hours to retrieve the data. Yes, hours. Not milliseconds, not seconds, not minutes — but hours.

It’s impossible to summarize it all in a paragraph or even an article. Amazon Web Services would require a book, but that tome would be out of date by the time it was printed because the service changes quickly. The best news is that Amazon is constantly looking at costs and generally lowering prices as it finds a way to deliver the product for less. Some prices have gone up occasionally over the years, an effort to make the prices reflect reality.

Amazon has also found plenty of supporters. A number of big companies such as Netflix are proud of using Amazon’s servers, and plenty of startups are glad they didn’t need to set up their own data centers to reach for the gold ring of IPO riches. Some customers brag about spending $1 million or more a month, an amount that would be more than enough for most companies to justify setting up an in-house facility and team. Clearly, Amazon is delivering a whole lot of value.

Google has opened the door to one of its data centers to Wired. Pretty amazing.

If you’re looking for the beating heart of the digital age — a physical location where the scope, grandeur, and geekiness of the kingdom of bits become manifest—you could do a lot worse than Lenoir, North Carolina. This rural city of 18,000 was once rife with furniture factories. Now it’s the home of a Google data center.

Engineering prowess famously catapulted the 14-year-old search giant into its place as one of the world’s most successful, influential, and frighteningly powerful companies. Its constantly refined search algorithm changed the way we all access and even think about information. Its equally complex ad-auction platform is a perpetual money-minting machine. But other, less well-known engineering and strategic breakthroughs are arguably just as crucial to Google’s success: its ability to build, organize, and operate a huge network of servers and fiber-optic cables with an efficiency and speed that rocks physics on its heels. Google has spread its infrastructure across a global archipelago of massive buildings—a dozen or so information palaces in locales as diverse as Council Bluffs, Iowa; St. Ghislain, Belgium; and soon Hong Kong and Singapore—where an unspecified but huge number of machines process and deliver the continuing chronicle of human experience.

This is what makes Google Google: its physical network, its thousands of fiber miles, and those many thousands of servers that, in aggregate, add up to the mother of all clouds. This multibillion-dollar infrastructure allows the company to index 20 billion web pages a day. To handle more than 3 billion daily search queries. To conduct millions of ad auctions in real time. To offer free email storage to 425 million Gmail users. To zip millions of YouTube videos to users every day. To deliver search results before the user has finished typing the query. In the near future, when Google releases the wearable computing platform called Glass, this infrastructure will power its visual search results.

The problem for would-be bards attempting to sing of these data centers has been that, because Google sees its network as the ultimate competitive advantage, only critical employees have been permitted even a peek inside, a prohibition that has most certainly included bards. Until now.

More on Cisco’s new Cloud Services Router 1000v with some thoughts on convergence thrown in.

Nothing is what it appears to be in the data center any more. Servers have integrated storage and switching, routers and switches are getting servers. And virtual switches and now virtual routers are running inside of servers and blade enclosures.

Nothing seems to know its proper place any more. Maybe it is convergence. Maybe it is confusion. Maybe it is both, and the desire by hardware and software makers to try to make their machines do a little bit of everything to try to take some market share away from each other.

The convergence continues apace at Cisco on Tuesday, with the company hosting its annual Cisco Live event, this time in San Diego. It is announcing a bunch of new gear that are part of the company’s Cloud Connected Solutions strategy of making the connections between mobile users and services running in the data center and out on the cloud more intelligent and efficient.

Let’s talk about the new hardware and software first and then how it all plugs together to reach the Cloud Connected strategy networking requirements that Cisco’s top brass say customers are asking it to meet.

Up front is a new Cloud Services Router 1000v which lifts Cisco’s routing software, running atop its IOS network operating system, off the iron and plunks it into a virtual machine for deployment out on the cloud. Cisco has taken IOS and the routing software stack in it physical hardware – including routing, VPN, firewall, NAT, QoS, application visibility, failover, and WAN optimization code – and ported it to a VM container that can execute on either VMware’s ESXi hypervisor or Citrix Systems’ XenServer hypervisor.

This is analogous to the virtual Nexus 1000v switch that Cisco created for its “California” Unified Computing System blade servers to virtualize the network links between VMs running on the blades.

Now Cisco can put routing and related security functions (all based on the familiar IOS stack) in all parts of an organizations infrastructure, whether it is an Aggregation Services Router (ASR) at the head end of the network, the Integrated Services Router (ISR) in the branch office, and the CSR out in the cloud.

By putting a virtual router out in the cloud, customers can extend their own routing networks into the data centers of cloud operators and ensure that their networks are isolated from other companies who are sharing that physical infrastructure. This will allow customers or managed service providers to offer end-to-end routing from the data center to the branch office to the cloud.

At the moment, the CSR1000v can be used as a VPN using IPSec security, and in the future Cisco will be adding support for SSL encryption. It can also be used to redirect traffic to Cisco’s virtual WAAS WAN optimization appliances, which debuted back in September 2010 and which optimizes traffic for the Nexus 1000v virtual switch. In October 2010, Cisco rolled out another virtual WAAS appliance that runs atop IOS itself and can run on any router in the Cisco lineup.

(The real question is this: When will Cisco just run all of its stuff on x86 iron and in secure partitions and just do away entirely with networking hardware, aside from ports that hang off a server?)

The CSR 1000v runs on x86 iron, of course, and the recommended configuration is to have four cores, 4GB of main memory, and 8GB of disk capacity allocated to its virtual machine for it to run.

It runs IOS-XE release 3.8 and will run atop ESXi 5.0 or XenServer 6.0 hypervisors. The product will be sold under a subscription model; pricing was not announced. Cisco says that the CSR 1000v will be available in the fourth quarter

…

In a nutshell, that is what all of this Cloud Connected Solution talk is all about. You can put a virtual switch or router on internal servers or external clouds, or on physical iron if you want to go that way, and also load up other software and services to run on virtual machines or coprocessors that make use of that cloudy switching and routing.

Cisco is cooking up its own Cloud Connected software, and to that end is rolling out its WAAS 5.0 with AppNav, which is a traffic steering mechanism for the WAAS WAN optimization appliance that can work with physical or virtual manifestations (running on the CSR 1000v cloudy router) of the WAAS software to pool and scale up traffic steering as needed.

Cisco has also created a Cloud Connector to run its ScanSafe web security software and its Host Collaboration Servicesdisaster recovery for IP telephony software for when the WAN crashes.

A recent Forrester report shows some interesting insights into the perception of the IT department by the business. In short, it doesn’t look good.

Forrester conducted a similar poll among 1,047 North American and European IT managers with responsibility for their companies’ budgets. Guess what? In every category of IT operations performance, the IT workers rated their own efficiency more highly than did the executives. And that difference in perception, Forrester concludes, is driving business departments to take more responsibility for IT purchasing and deployment decisions.

“Senior management is frustrated with IT’s ability to deliver,” Forrester’s John C. McCarthy writes. 

Only 15.7% of executive respondents said they’re increasing their departments’ involvement in IT, in an effort to decentralize procurement and deployment away from their IT departments. Fifty-nine percent say they get IT support from a centralized IT resource, while 20% say it comes from a dedicated, division-specific IT resource. (That last figure is up 9% over last year, by the way.) Among those who are increasing their divisions’ involvement this year, 75% agreed with the statement, “Technology is too important for the business not to be involved,” and 54% agreed with, “IT does not understand the business issues and priorities to do it by itself.”

If we were to stop there, we might conclude that corporate departments want to move decision-making closer to the executive suite. However, when asked what they intend to do when they do get control of the IT process, a tremendous number of executives said they were planning to outsource it.

A full 36% of executive respondents said they plan to outsource IT services - a 19% jump over last year. And 25% said they plan to hire systems integration consultants this year, a 7% rise over 2010.

What do businesses expect these consultants to produce first?  A total of 46% of executives responding said they either have already tasked these consultants, or are making plans within the next 12 months, to have them… build a website for them. Not a Facebook page, not a social gathering point, but a website.

Safety Still Leads to Hesitancy for the Cloud

You might think that cloud technology would play a more prominent role in affecting these executives’ planning decisions. As it turns out, only 34% of executives responding say they use a SaaS application for customer relationship management or human resources - the two top categories of SaaS. Another 6% are requesting to use such service, and 19% are thinking about it, but the total doesn’t even eclipse the two-thirds mark. And every other category of SaaS ranked lower on Forrester’s executive survey.

What’s keeping businesses from finally making the leap? The result was an absolutely clear signal, from both the executives and the IT managers polled: Some 38% of executives and 46% of IT managers polled agreed with the statement, “We cannot manage security to our strict standards” - far higher than any other statement in the list.

To summarize: Businesses absolutely know they need to cut costs in this economy, and they know both mobile devices and cloud applications are means to that end. But they don’t know what Step 1 should be. Executives know the IT department isn’t taking Step 1, so they and their division leaders are taking the reins for themselves. But once they have the control, they don’t know how to begin either, so they hire consultants - even creating new external IT departments to take over from the internal ones. What’s keeping them from going forward with what should otherwise be a simple implementation plan, are fears about security, compliance and identity management. Simple solutions are being obstructed by complex problems - far more complex than the consumerization of IT.

How do you measure cloud’s total cost of ownership? Turns out there’s no easy answer.

Despite the name, total cost of ownership (TCO) is not the measure of “total cost,” as used by economists, but the measure of “accounting cost.” TCO calculations measure some costs and are useful for business decisions, yet these calculations always leave out other costs that inevitably only the user can define. Analysts and end users alike will benefit from recognizing that TCO calculates only the accounting cost and does not include the opportunity cost, which includes the cost of the “road not taken,” in a cost scenario. Opportunity cost needs to be included in a true analysis of total cost.

On February 11, GigaOM published a blog post claiming to show that Amazon Web Services (AWS) cost more than a self-hosted solution. In a responding post, Amazon retorted that the GigaOM post was wrong and listed a number of factors which it said GigaOM failed to take into account. This, in turn, prompted a clarification by GigaOM. What got lost in the exchange was whether the typical TCO analysis determines the total economic cost – accounting cost plus opportunity cost. The confusion comes from conflating accounting cost and total cost.

Clearly, there are tradeoffs in the risks of hosting computing resources on physical servers versus public clouds. For example, cloud may have hidden risks to cost, like inflation (with physical servers, users lock in a particular amount of computing capacity they purchase for a fixed amount of money, while that same amount of capacity in a cloud may gradually become more expensive if inflation starts to outpace the advances of Moore’s Law). On the other hand, physical equipment has more inventory risk, such as the possibility that the user bought too much stuff. After the accounting costs are tallied, a user needs to place monetary values on these different risks to determine the true cost of one solution versus another.

Another cost consideration related to cloud computing, which some have already called out, is opportunity cost, that is, the fallout from loss of alternatives as a result of choosing one path or another. For example, in one particular scenario, physical servers may prove cheaper than cumulative cloud costs over the lifecycle of the servers when only TCO is considered. However, the fact that the cloud allows costs to be delayed until the very moment resources are needed may allow money to be invested in the short term with initiatives that have a greater return over the long term, such as additional resources related to sales and marketing, or development of code leading to greater business differentiation down the road. These are all “opportunities” that would be lost by not choosing the cloud, even if TCO were ultimately lower when investing in on-premise physical infrastructure.

Whether a cloud service like Amazon AWS is more or less expensive than physical servers in the accounting ledger for different scenarios does not give users the full picture. In weighing a physical-versus-cloud solution, the user may place different value on a variety of options offered by cloud and physical hosting. In order to get a true total cost analysis, the value of those options needs to be added to the accounting cost. That point was missing in most of the discussion on GigaOM’s blog.

Some predictions on cloud computing - with a shout out to the mainframe.

1. Brands May Come and Go – But No Technology Will Die

Not only are we not living in a ‘post-PC’ world, we are not even living in a ‘post-mainframe’ world! Cloud will not kill data centers, virtual will not kill physical, tablets will not kill PCs, Mac will not kill Windows, Android will not kill iOS, streaming will not kill DVDs. The technology pie is growing, our choices are expanding, and almost every slice is getting bigger. So be prepared to manage an ever-increasing selection of technologies across public and private boundaries.

2. Hybrid IT Will Be ‘The Next Big Thing’

‘Hybrid cloud’ was soooo 2011! In this new world of choices, business will expect hybrid IT: a combination of on-site and off-site; cloud and legacy; private and public; physical and virtual; social and secure; enterprise and consumer; desktop and server; mobile and static. Business will also expect IT to make them work together, whether IT owns the service or not. IT must act as a trusted advisor, as a service broker, and as quality assurance for this brave new world of complex Hybrid IT.

3. Service Quality Will Be IT’s Responsibility Again

As hybrid IT proliferates, business owners will (again) realize they do not want to manage technology; they just want it to work. In 2012, end users will increasingly expect IT to take responsibility for service quality, regardless of who is buying, selling, or delivering that service. IT will need to eliminate the blind spots in hybrid IT, actively support an explosion of devices, deal with complex cross-boundary services, and find a way to deliver a 360-degree service assurance across all facets of end-user experience.

4. Public Cloud Adoption Will Slow

Given the results of this year’s Longhaus research from Australia – an early adopter market and a bellwether for business technology – I suspect the rest of the world is in for a slowdown of public cloud adoption. Issues (perceived or real) with security, compliance, service quality, skills, staffing, complexity, and good old politics will all put the brakes on. Whether ‘cloud stall’ will be as pronounced as ‘virtual stall’ is unsure, but 2012 will see a marked slowdown in public cloud adoption.

5. Public Cloud ‘Gets’ Security

Sad but true – many (most?) enterprise decision-makers still do not trust public cloud. In 2012, IT must do a better job of deploying and explaining cloud security – and I believe we will! In 2012, CIOs will see security as less of a barrier to cloud adoption as organizations adopt more and better cloud-oriented security solutions – including solutions designed for complex hybrid cloud services, as well as solutions that are delivered through the cloud with easily-consumed Security SaaS options.

6. Big Iron is Back – Part I

No, mainframe is still not dead. On the contrary, 2012 will see the rise of the mainframe as a *gasp* cloud platform. Massively scalable, hosting critical (and underutilized) ‘big data’, capable of running complex cloud workloads on a variety of architectures (z/OS, Linux, UNIX, Windows), mainframe is really an obvious cloud platform. It will not replace commodity clouds, but large enterprises and governments especially will leverage their investments and bring big iron into their cloud mix.

7. Cloud Gets Heterogeneous

Not only will mainframe become part of the cloud landscape, but public cloud providers will also start to offer UNIX and maybe even other non-x86 platforms. I have recently seen this in action (CA did it internally years ago), and most large enterprises are heavily dependent on heterogeneous systems for their mission-critical applications. Despite the common myth that cloud == commodity servers, heterogeneous servers will start to become more available for large enterprise deployments.

8. Big Iron is Back – Part II

Big iron concepts of integrated compute, network, and storage are resurgent – but this is not your grandpa’s mainframe. Deployment of integrated fabrics like Cisco UCS and VCE Vblock will accelerate rapidly in 2012 as IT changes the way it thinks about integrated infrastructure for virtualization and cloud – and realizes how amazing these integrated boxes are for diverse, dynamic, high-volume workloads like desktop virtualization, pop-up data centers, and cloudbursting.

 9. ‘Grown-up’ Cloud Service Management Comes To The Forefront

In 2011, the NIST Cloud Reference Architecture devoted a whole section to ‘Cloud Service Management’, and IT started to talk about ‘grown-up’ disciplines – planning, budgeting, performance, asset, inventory, service levels, audit, etc. In 2012, even ‘commodity’ cloud vendors will finally take cloud management seriously, as enterprises and governments demand these disciplines – and smaller providers differentiate on service and security, not just price.

10. Virtualization Management Becomes Irrelevant

In January 2009 I predicted, “in 3-5 years … niche [Virtual System Management] vendors will no longer survive, as virtualization becomes a core part of the enterprise compute fabric.” Three years later this trend has definitely started, and will accelerate in 2012 as IT turns instead to hybrid IT management, recognizing that silos of standalone virtualization management is a costly and inefficient burden. Maybe 2012 is not the end of Virtualization Management, but it is going to be the start of the demise.

OpenStack has opened up a temporary cloud, called TryStack, to try and entice developers away from Amazon.

How does a cloud project solve a problem like Amazon? The once genteel etailer of toasters, books and CDs has now become a byword for “cloud”.

People just can’t stop stuffing more of their data into Amazon’s EC2 service. The number of objects held in EC2’s S3 storage service grew by nearly 200 per cent in 2011 to 762 billion, compared to 156 per cent growth in the year before.

More will be mopped up more in 2012, as Amazon has made it easier and even cheaper to use S3.

Bezos’s company cut its entry-level prices by 10 per cent from 1 Feb, to $0.125 for the first terabyte. In January it uncloaked the AWS Storage Gateway beta to act as a cloud-based data back-up service for companies, thereby hovering in even more.

Developers are the problem. Amazon has made it easy to test and develop apps at a very low price using open or at least familiar programming languages, tools and databases. The service couldn’t be more ubiquitous: fire up a browser and it’s easy to find and start EC2.

If you’re the OpenStack Project hoping to challenge Amazon for the business customers putting their apps in the cloud, then one approach might be to tempt developers with a suck-it-and-see scheme for this “Linux for the cloud” effort.

OpenStack is about to open up FreeCloud, which lets you test the idea of OpenStack while running it hosted in a sandboxed environment. FreeCloud’s also getting the re-branding iron run over its hyde: it’s now called TryStack. The idea is TryStack lets you test OpenStack without either having to download and install the code on your own servers or – if that sounds like to much hassle – have to sign a contract with a service provider running OpenStack in their cloud before you know you’ll like or need it. It’s meant to tie into the Devstack Openstack development toolkit here.

With Amazon, there’s no code or modules to download – the service is ready to go reducing the barriers to experimentation and producing potential future customers.

Jonathan Bryce, OpenStack project chairman and chief technology officer and founder of The Rackspace Cloud, told The Reg: “We heard from several people the are interested in using OpenStack, but don’t have the sysadmins do build the KVM or networking.

“Because it’s a set of services and servers you have to set up and run yourself, and if you are developer working on an application you are more used to having access to a running environment and putting code in rather than having to build that environment.

“One of the first targets that brought this need to our attention was app developers who write tools for managing clouds - companies like Cyberduck and EC2 Firefox extension. They need a functioning version of an OpenStack cloud that they can program against. To get that they’d have to install OpenStack somewhere and to that they’d need the hardware.

TryStack has been in use by about 12 customers for the last five months as FreeCloud. It was built by Rackspace and NTT using Dell servers and hosting and bandwidth from Equinox - all OpenStack Project members. TryStack runs the last release of OpenStack, called Diablo, coming with compute, object storage and Glance for doing snap shots, with dashboard and authentication.

You’d think TryStack would use stealth to attract and retain developers, but it doesn’t and TryStack is purely a developer service that’s not been built for long-term hosting. Not yet, at least.

TryStack users must buy into an invented currency, called Stack Dollars. Everybody gets 100,000 Stack Dollars that gives them “a couple of gigabytes for a couple of days”. Stack Dollars don’t have any actual monetary value, and they can be topped up. The smaller your compute instances the longer the dollars last, the larger the quicker they burn. Once your finished, your compute resources return to the pool while TryStack doesn’t come with any SLAs and the service might get taken offline for upgrades Bryce said.

The OpenStackers behind TryStack really don’t want you getting any ideas about hanging around. For OpenStack, however, this might be the best way to grow against Amazon. The problem is commercial operations like Dell, Rackspace, Citrix and Hewlett-Packard are either delivering or building clouds using OpenStack and so wouldn’t appreciate the free competition.

Rackspace, Bryce’s employer, was a instrumental in creating OpenStack and has led construction of significant portions of the code – compute and storage – that it’s now deploying on its hosting servers. Rackspace just notched up its first billion-dollar year after 12 years in the biz.

HP’s OpenStack cloud has been in beta since September – it’s currently an Infrastructure-as-a-Service service providing compute and storage. With Citrix’s CloudStack, you download either uncompiled or compiled binaries. How Citrix charges isn’t clear and it still seems to relying on the Cloud.com start-up it bought last year for users to configure the code. Dell’s not getting its hands dirty, and is now selling an OpenStack “solution” – blueprints and advice on setting up an OpenStack cloud running on Dell servers.

The thinking behind TryStack is that it will pique developers’ interest in a cloud architecture for everybody who’s not Amazon – PC and server manufacturers, service providers, software makers and others. “It’s about making it easy for people to try it out … hopefully that leads to business for all the OpenStack companies afterwards,” Bryce said.

But translating that into a paying business for those with a stake in the project will be another thing altogether. With the “deploy” portion of the development cycle not available and with so many OpenStack clouds in different states of public availability, it’s likely Amazon will continue to grow fat, and fast, before OpenStack starts racking up.