#qstack

OpenStack continues to attract most of the attention, but other hybrid/private cloud infrastructures are still out there. Iceland's CloudStack-based GreenQloud is one, which continues to evolve its green and spook-proof story to meet additional customer requirements.

As I discussed back in February, the company took the code running in its Iceland and Washington State data centres, and turned it into something that customers could run for themselves. More interesting, in many ways, than just running GreenQloud code in your own data centre is the opportunity for building and managing hybrid clouds. We've seen plenty of stand-alone hybrid cloud management tools, from the likes of RightScale, Enstratius (acquired by and increasingly integrated with Dell) and others, but there are some interesting opportunities created when your cloud of choice gains the ability to control other pieces of your on- and off-premise IT estate.

Iceland's CCP is hardly a household name, but I'm sure many of you have heard of at least one of the company's creations - EVE Online. They're the latest to adopt QStack, and its hybrid capabilities clearly appealed… According to GreenQloud's press release,

CCP wanted their private cloud to have hybrid options which could be managed from a single pane of glass. With QStack, CCP can control both their internal infrastructure and burst into a public cloud provider of choice with a full project and departmental overview of usage,” said Jónsi Stefánsson, CEO of GreenQloud.

There are probably lots of pun-filled headlines about Prius that I should use here, but a brain addled by a day moderating sessions and taking briefings here at CloudComputingExpo can't think of any right now.

GreenQloud, the Icelandic provider of a heavily tweaked CloudStack-based IaaS offering which just happens to be 100% powered by renewable energy, is embracing the current enthusiasm for Hybrid clouds.

With QStack, the company is now offering a version of its code that you can run inside your own data centre. You can scale compute jobs beyond your own facilities to a GreenQloud data centre when required, and other CloudStack-based public clouds will also be addressable in due course. In fact, given GreenQloud's compatibility with Amazon's storage and compute APIs, maybe they won't stop at CloudStack clouds...?

GreenQloud's existing dashboards monitor energy consumption and other green indicators, and that functionality will also be available in QStack. Most of the data centres where QStack runs will probably look a lot less green than GreenQloud's, but I doubt that the scary numbers will drive an immediate rush to find new data centre providers. However, the growing visibility of what's being consumed and what it's impact is may have a beneficial effect in the longer term as companies rationalise their IT estate, seek to meet legal obligations around emissions reduction, etc... Let's hope so, anyway.

The CloudStack code inside QStack isn't exactly the same as the code running on the public GreenQloud offering; it's actually a more modern version of the codebase, and the GreenQloud public cloud will catch up later this year...