Bossie Awards 2012: The best open source data center and cloud software

The data centers of tomorrow will be vastly more flexible and dynamic than the data centers of today, and these Bossie winners — some of the fastest-moving projects we know — will be the software that takes us there. But along with free open source tools for building and automating virtualization clusters and private clouds, you’ll also find some old favorites here.

Developed by Google, Ganeti is a management tool for small clusters of virtualization servers running Xen or KVM. It supports setting up instances using a file, an LVM volume, or a DRBD mirror. Ganeti can do live migrations of instances from one server to another, and unlike other budding “cloud controllers,” it provides real HA fail-over versus rebooting lost VMs elsewhere on the cluster. However, only local storage is supported. If you’re interested in Ganeti, you should also have a look at a separate project called Ganeti Web Manager, which provides a good Web UI on top of the management system. A private cloud operating system from Google — who knew? — High Mobley

While Amazon has been establishing its AWS APIs as the de facto standard for cloud services, Jclouds has been busy making the differences between Amazon’s cloud APIs and everyone else’s irrelevant. The Jclouds project is a cloud services API abstraction layer, designed to make dealing with multiple cloud services simple and portable and mired in as few dependencies as possible. The Jclouds APIs — available for Java and Clojure — can be used to control Amazon Web Services, OpenStack, Eucalyptus, Windows Azure, and many more cloud services. As many cloud computing projects turn to AWS compatibility, while many others, such as VMware, continue going their own way, Jclouds offers a single cloud API to cover them all. — High Mobley

What Chef and Puppet bring to system configuration, Canonical’s Juju brings to Ubuntu cloud management — namely a reusable set of resources to bootstrap cloud services and even the servers they’re running on. Combining metadata for describing services and scripts (aka Charms) for controlling them, Juju delivers consistent, reproducible service deployment, orchestration, and scaling. Best of all, using Juju is as simple as installing or removing an Ubuntu package. More work is needed on the Charms front. But as more Charms become available, Juju will not only take the tedium out of administering large and dynamic environments, but allow smaller shops to take advantage of the best practices they encapsulate. — James R. Borck

Ceph is a distributed file system that is very well put together and offers everything you need, from basic network storage to high-performance clusters for big data crunching. Anywhere there was a need for NFS can now be fulfilled with CFS. This will remedy all the file lock issues you experienced using the Linux native file system. And Ceph is remarkably easier to install and configure than other cluster-ready offerings. GlusterFS may be the presumptive heir to the distributed file system throne, but with additional maturity, Ceph may establish a dynasty of its own. — Andrew Oliver and Leon Justice

Based on FreeBSD, the open source FreeNAS storage platform has a long list of features that includes ZFS, thin provisioning, remote replication, S.M.A.R.T. monitoring, a comprehensive Web GUI, and support for high-speed networking (10GbE). FreeNAS has done a good job of supporting most popular file-sharing protocols, but is notably missing support for WebDAV, which should be included in the next major release. The current release (8.2) provides a plug-in architecture, with the plug-ins running within a BSD jail for security. There are already plug-ins for BitTorrent, UPnP, iTunes/DAAP, and a Web server. — High Mobley