Basho, the company behind the Riak CS distributed object store, is joining the Apache CloudStack Project and will work to integrate its storage with the CloudStack open-source cloud platform.The company is contributing some, but not all, of the code to the project. CloudStack is the cloud platform backed by Citrix(s ctrx) as a rival to the OpenStack cloud and Basho will work with Citrix on this integration.
With Amazon(s amzn) S3 storage dominating the market for public cloud storage, an array of service providers and enterprises are looking for API-compatible options. That’s where Riak CS comes in.
Basho CTO Justin Sheehy said Riak CS works with OpenStack now and will continue to do so — but the OpenStack project includes its own Swift storage technology. Customers, however, can plug in whatever storage they want as needed. “A very large Fortune 25 telecom company is using OpenStack compute and Riak CS instead of Swift,” Sheehy said.
The move into the Apache CloudStack effort comes in response to requests from customers and integrators, he added.
The news comes a few weeks after Shanley Kane, Basho’s director of product management, dropped her attempt to join the OpenStack Foundation board after alleged harassment by an unnamed OpenStack board member. The dustup is described in this ITworld report. Sheehy said Kane was seeking the directorship on her own, but Basho backed her decision to do that.
While it seems pretty clear that Basho is aligning with Cloudstack in this open cloud battle, Sheehy said the company would continue to work with those in the OpenStack community.
“We’re not part of the OpenStack Foundation at this point– which seems pretty much pay-to-play, but we’ll continue to work with the code. Theree are a lot of great people in the OpenStack community — one kerfuffle doesn’t negate that.”
Henry Baltazar, senior analyst for storage and systems at The 451 Group, said there will be demand for Amazon-compatible cloud storage options Riak CS and DreamHost’s new object store based on Ceph.
“The main thing for all these cloud guys is they need to hit as many markets as possible — and the Amazon API set is the most important. You’ll probably also see a lot of these storage guys coming out with Swift-compatible storage,” he said.
