While it’s no major revelation that the world of IT is changing rapidly, it is a bit of a revelation that Rackspace’s OpenStack is at the helm of this change. For instance, the National Security Agency (NSA) — you know, the agency in charge of all that top secret government stuff — recently revealed that OpenStack is aiding in a shift to how the organization approaches data management and analysis. While it didn’t reveal big picture specifics of just how the open source cloud-computing platform was utilized within the organization, it did give some insights into how cloud computing is transforming the way it manages data. In short, this new OpenStack configuration provides more efficient management of data in the agency’s cloud.

An open cloud ecosystem also makes it easier than ever to mix and match your cloud services. A company can purchase cloud storage from an OpenStack provider and run Compute in-house. OpenStack provides interoperability and an even greater ability to expand a cloud deployment easily, through adding more servers internally or purchasing expanded infrastructure from a third party provider.

This is big news for both IT and OpenStack. This new era of open source cloud computing is ushering in some exciting things for companies utilizing big data resources, which is pretty much everybody these days. Let’s take a closer look at OpenStack and how it’s affecting users.

Three user-centric benefits of OpenStack

Boosted Efficiency: 

 Users experience high levels of efficiency as they deploy private clouds. Most companies reported setting lofty goals and declared that through the high availability, failure-proof capabilities of the OpenStack platform, coupled with a robust support community, enabled them to stay efficient enough to meet their productivity goals.

Speedy Service: 

 Rackspace, a company known for fanatical service, collaborated with NASA to develop OpenStack. This is proving to IT departments all over the globe that infrastructure as a service in the open cloud can efficiently handle large-scale computing needs.

Freedom from Vendor Lock-in: 

Freedom is at the core of the OpenStack model. No longer are enterprise-class organizations tied to expensive — and often inefficient — vendors that promise the sky and can’t deliver. Companies can now build powerful cloud solutions and execute them to perfection — or something pretty darn close — with the support of the OpenStack community coupled with the fanatical support offered up by the folks at Rackspace. It allows companies to keep costs down while offering the best service possible to their customers, without breaking the bank.

OpenStack is Rapidly Evolving

One of the most attractive things about open source cloud computing is that it’s constantly evolving. Rackspace developers are always working to make things better, and users are not completely relying on the top brass to come up with solutions for common problems within the OpenStack platform. In fact, as part of the OpenStack community, users are both able and encouraged to collaborate to make the platform more powerful and more efficient. Again, this is great news for both the IT community and OpenStack users in general.