Rackspace has extended its contributor agreement with CERN to continue creation of a reference architecture and operational model for federated cloud services.
Having previously developed identity authentication over multiple OpenStack clouds, the agreement extension will see Rackspace and CERN openlab extend the identity authentication concept to develop standardised templates for OpenStack cloud orchestration.
It will allow customers to take a single action to spin up an environment across multiple cloud platforms.
The agreement involves the creation of full multi-cloud open standard orchestration capability, dependent on shared installation images, to facilitate management of virtual machines in remote clouds.
The CERN data centre presently stores more than 30 petabytes of data per year that is generated by the experiments on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The data is then made available to physicists through CERN’s distributed computing infrastructure.
With the agreement, Rackspace will be able to test future technology solutions in CERN’s computing environment, which will help the company boost the development of future technology solutions to address real business and IT challenges.
Rackspace said that it would continue funding a full time research fellow at CERN to help with the federation project and CERN would conduct service testing using Rackspace Public Cloud.
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Rackspace’s Customer Technology Services director Giri Fox said: "More companies are now looking to use multiple clouds to effectively serve the range of workloads they run – blending low-cost, high-performance, enhanced security and optimised environments.
"But, we are still seeing the complexity businesses are facing to integrate just one cloud into their business. Federation is an opportunity to re-use that initial integration for future clouds you want to run your business on, making multi-cloud a business benefit choice rather than a business cost one."
