Today several OpenStack™ community members announced their collaboration to build TryStack, a free sandbox for those interested in exploring and testing OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system. Initially driven by OpenStack community members Dell™, HP, NTT® and Rackspace® Hosting, TryStack is ideal for developers, end users and the technology ecosystem interested in testing software that communicates over OpenStack APIs without having to set up and administer their own deployment.

TryStack users will be able to launch OpenStack Compute instances that last up to 24 hours, at which point resources for the instances are reclaimed and made available to other TryStack users. Each registered user will receive a set amount of Stack Dollars they can use to “lease” instances within that time period.

TryStack is intended to provide users the ability to launch instances in one of several TryStack zones, representing different OpenStack reference architectures and geographical locations. The first zone available now has 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. Individual contributors from Dell, HP Cloud Services, NTT and Rackspace Cloud Builders helped deploy, test and administer TryStack for community use.

The project also serves as a unique place for the OpenStack development community to proactively identify any problems with packaging and deployment. Additionally, end users can gain experience administering an OpenStack cloud on a variety of heterogeneous hypervisors and network topologies, as well as document differences in behavior, functionality and performance between various reference architectures.

To learn more about TryStack and get involved:

• Visit www.TryStack.org to become a registered user, and follow @TryStack on Twitter
• Attend a webinar, Thursday, February 23 to see a demo of TryStack
• Register for an OpenStack San Francisco Meetup about TryStack, Tuesday, March 6, and look for more to come

Supporting Quotes

“Dell has been a vocal advocate for and an active participant in OpenStack since its announcement, and we’re excited to play a key role in the TryStack project,” said John Igoe, Dell executive director of cloud and big data solutions. “We’re proud to have been the first member to take a supported OpenStack solution to market, and the TryStack project represents a tremendous opportunity to accelerate innovation in the community.”

“TryStack is a good place for operators and the OpenDevOps Community. While the open source community is a collaboration of coding, the OpenDevOps Community is a collaboration of operators. We can share know-how for effective operations, experiences and troubleshooting. We are happy to see cloud administrators using TryStack,” said Nachi Ueno, researcher at NTT Information Sharing Platform Laboratories.

"As an OpenStack contributor, I am happy to see TryStack available for those looking for a starting point to explore OpenStack's ecosystem of distributions and products," said Jesse Andrews, director of development for Rackspace Cloud Builders. "TryStack provides a simple way to get some hands-on experience with OpenStack."

“TryStack is intended to enable collaboration between individuals and companies dedicated to developing the latest open source cloud computing technologies,” said Jay Pipes, director, Open Source Cloud Development at HP and OpenStack Image Service project technical lead. “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.”

About OpenStack™

OpenStack is a global collaboration of developers building an open source cloud computing platform that any organization can use to build private or public clouds. Established to drive industry standards, end cloud lock-in and speed cloud adoption by creating a common, open platform for both public and private clouds, OpenStack currently has the support of nearly 150 industry leading companies and more than 2,300 project participants. The open source cloud operating system currently consists of five core components, which together manage pools of compute, storage and networking resources. For more information and to join the community, visit www.OpenStack.org