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.

“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.”