This week in cloud: Open Compute gets OK for government work

Open Compute servers for government work? It just got a little bit closer  to reality when Hyve Solutions qualified as a government-approved vendor under the General Services Administration (GSA) Schedule.

Two years ago, Facebook launched the Open Compute Project  to open-source the design of energy-efficient data center hardware. Facebook’s  Prineville, Ore. data center (pictured) is an early showcase of Open Compute hardware.  Intel, Rackspace, and Goldman Sachs also back the effort.

The GSA’s Schedule 70 puts IT providers on an “approved list,” which makes it easier for them to win government contracts. The fact that Hyve, a division of Synnex, got the nod, means it will be easier for government agencies to use Facebook’s data center designs, according to Data Center Knowledge.

Another week, another set of outages

It doesn’t help the case of broader cloud adoption when popular services go offline. And last week there were two major snafus — Microsoft’sHotmail and Outlook.com services both went down for a (vocal) subset of users starting Monday with issues continuing into Wednesday. On Thursday, Dropbox went down. The popular file-share-and-sync service — it claims 100 million users – was restored Friday. There was no post mortem in either case, of what went wrong.

Dell, Intel back Mirantis’ OpenStack play

Mirantis, a systems integrator that has been pushing its vision of vendor-agnostic OpenStack clouds, got $ 10 million in funding from two vendors — Dell and Intel, as well as WestSummit Capital to fund its efforts.

The company says it builds the best OpenStack cloud per customer requirements based on its knowledge of which OpenStack components are most advanced and stable. Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel said the fact that it’s taking money from Dell will not neutralize its vendor-independent position.

A cadre of high-tech vendors including Dell, HP, Cisco, IBM, Red Hat are all aboard the OpenStack train. Mirantis already was working with both Dell and Cisco on their respective OpenStack implementations, he said.  WestSummit, a venture capital firm based in Beijing, will help Mirantis crack the insular Asian market, Ionel said.

 Photo courtesy of Flickr user IntelFreePress


GigaOM