Eradication of IaaS vendor lock-in is essential if companies and enterprises are to move toward an open and standard cloud, and OpenStack, a large-scale open source cloud project and community has been established to do just that.

Cloud Services Provider NephoScale launched its object-based Cloud Storage service in January 2011, using the OpenStack storage system and claims to be the first generally available offering to do so, apart from Rackspace.

Founded by Rackspace Hosting (News - Alert), through its wholly owned subsidiary, OpenStack, LLC, OpenStack is supported by more than 50 participating companies. Its primary objectives are to drive industry standards, end cloud lock-in and help service providers and enterprises to accelerate their migration toward the cloud. The project currently includes OpenStack Object Storage, a fully distributed object store, and OpenStack Compute, a scalable compute provisioning engine.

Using OpenStack Object Storage as a framework for its cloud storage services, NephoScale said it has lived up to its reputation for fostering innovation and interoperability in the global cloud community by adding value by contributing source code to OpenStack, thereby adding features to the underlying storage engine and is constantly looking for ways to help advance the OpenStack Satori Project.

NephoScale's flagship infrastructure services, which include cloud servers and on-demand dedicated servers, in addition to cloud storage, were designed for true global scalability and fault tolerance. It enables companies to reap the benefits of increased scale, improved service levels, and more reliability with little or no capital expenditure.

In a press release, Telemachus Luu, CTO of NephoScale said that the search for a cloud storage system for its IaaS platform had led it to settle for OpenStack as it met the company's requirements for object-based storage, scalability and redundancy and was the fastest way to develop a core infrastructure.

NephoScale object-based Cloud Storage solution replicates objects three times, translating to uptimes in excess of 99.999 percent and has an ability to scale to hundreds of petabytes and is currently available through the NephoScale website on a pay-as-you-go basis, with no long-term commitment.

Jonathan Bryce, chairman of the OpenStack Project Oversight Committee, and founder of the Rackspace Cloud said in a statement that progressive companies like NephoScale had paved the way for the eradication of IaaS vendor lock-in, which he believed would spur market growth, making the goal of an open and standard cloud a reality.