The might of OpenStack’s very big backers has become more and more apparent in recent weeks. Announcements from Red Hat, Rackspace and Canonical in just the past few days show OpenStack to be emerging as the clear leader in open cloud platforms. Now, as GigaOm reports, The OpenStack Foundation has just named its top leaders, and they are from heavy-hitting Silicon Valley companies. Alan Clark, director of industry initiatives and open source for SUSE is reportedly chairman. And Lew Tucker, Cisco’sVP and CTO of cloud, is reportedly vice chairman. SUSE has also just launched its OpenStack platform.
“SUSE added a new face to its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) portfolio with the August 29 unveiling of SUSE Cloud at the CloudOpen conference. An OpenStack-based automated cloud computing platform, SUSE Cloud promises improved resource utilization and speedier workload provisioning while also adding another voice in support of the OpenStack effort.”
SUSE’s announcement follows Rackspace, which has begun calling itself “the open cloud company,” announcing the release of Rackspace Private Cloud software, built on OpenStack and designed for companies that want to install, test and run a multi-node OpenStack-based private cloud environment. Then there was Red Hat’s announcement of its upcoming OpenStack-based cloud platform, already available in a preview edition. And now, as it releases a significant update to Ubuntu 12.04, Canonical is also doubling down on its OpenStack focus. As it releases Ubuntu 12.04.1, Canonical is launching Ubuntu Cloud Archive, an OpenStack software archive.
Finally, let’s not forget that HP is placing a big bet on OpenStack as well. It won’t be a surprise to see this week’s CloudOpen conference bring more OpenStack-related news. This is clearly an open source platform with backing and momentum.
