Dell, NTT, Rackspace, HP Launch Free OpenStack Sandbox

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According to to the press release, TryStack enables the creation of OpenStack Compute instances that run for 24 hours before the resources go back into the pool. Every user is allocated a certain amount of “Stack Dollars” that can be used to budget for instances.

Each of the so-called TryStack zones represents a different OpenStack reference architecture and geographical location, with the first zone  offering “156 cores, 1040GB memory and 59.1 TB of disk storage running the latest OpenStack release (code-name Diablo), Dell PowerEdge C6100 and C6105 servers and libvirt/KVM.” I can’t imagine why the company would ever use an older version of OpenStack, but the specification that it’s running the latest version indicates that perhaps down the line TryStack could be used to field-test future releases of the platform.

The aforementioned technology companies — Dell, NTT, Rackspace Cloud Builders and HP — all contributed to the deployment, testing and administration of TryStack, proving that OpenStack really is bringing vendors together. OpenStack itself says it’s going to use TryStack within the community to identify any problems with packaging and deployment.

“TryStack is intended to enable collaboration between individuals and companies dedicated to developing the latest open source cloud computing technologies. This is intended to provide OpenStack users with a stable, easy solution to test applications and the community will also be stronger for this effort,” said HP Director of Open Source Cloud Development Jay Pipes in a prepared statement.

Speaking of HP, we knew the company was somehow involved with FreeCloud, the last OpenStack sandbox project TalkinCloud heard about. But in researching this story, it looks as though FreeCloud (which was only ever an unsupported side project anyway) has vanished completely. The logical conclusion is that TryStack has completely supplanted FreeCloud as the OpenStack sandbox of choice, but we’ll let you know if we hear otherwise.