While hardware is at the core of what Cisco does, the company is no stranger to software
either. In many cases, software from Cisco is all about leveraging and enabling its networking and server gear, but that’s not the whole story when it comes to Cisco’s open source OpenStack release.
Cisco released the first version of its OpenStack Cisco Edition late Friday. Cisco has been an active participant in the open stack ecosystem since at least January of 2011.
OpenStack is a multi-stakeholder project that is all about building an open source cloud 
platform. It’s not a monolithic project, but rather is made up of a number of core projects that all come together under the OpenStack umbrella.
Nova is the core compute project, Swift is the storage project, Keystone provides identity and Glance is an imaging system. There is also the Quantum Project, which is the networking piece, and that’s where a key area of focus for Cisco lies.
Read the full story at ServerWatch:
Cisco Debuts Its Own OpenStack Distribution
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.