The cloud is the future of enterprise, no questions asked. But, where it is heading is quite uncertain. Experts and big names in the industry like Cisco believe that driving open source standards for both public and private clouds will be the next key play.  This notion led them to take a chance on OpenStack, a Rackspace project and community that supports over 50 organizations in a large-scale open source cloud.

The potential around this platform lured other keen gamblers within the tech sphere. Yesterday, leading web and application hosting provider DreamHost extended support to OpenStack through Ceph integration.

DreamHost’s Ben Cherian, General Manager of Emerging Technologies, explained how they discovered OpenStack and their confidence in open source platform. He said, “We had originally created Ceph to address an industry need for a commodity-based open source distributed data storage platform. When we learned of the OpenStack project, we saw a real opportunity to apply this technology to a larger community effort.  We believe that the future of cloud computing is in open source, and efforts like OpenStack are key to realizing its full potential.”

Meanwhile, Community Manager at OpenStack Stephen Spector returned the favor and expressed thrill about the support saying, “We are excited to strengthen the OpenStack community through the ongoing contributions of DreamHost, a service provider with deep expertise around open source distributed data storage. We welcome DreamHost’s contributions and their shared vision of a scalable and open cloud.”

By virtue of helping customers build real infrastructure-as-a-service clouds that are scalable, efficient and open by design, Citrix formalizes the launch of OpenStack’s commercial version, the Project Olympus. Through this, companies and service providers will be able to easily assemble OpenStack private or public clouds based on real architectures from Dell and Rackspace.

With the future gleaming so bright, open cloud growth becomes a magnet for market competition. QLogic, Hadoop and Cloudera are all rooting for leadership. Hadoop-based Datameer recently bagged $9 million in additional funds from Kleiner Perkins. The recent Hadoop deployments via Cloudera spread across various platforms as big data analytics becomes a major trend within the open source cloud.

IT companies are now driven by cloud adaptation and virtualization. RackSpace’s development of OpenStack is deemed by industry experts as a smart business move. Revolving around honest customer service, the defining feature of OpenStack lies on its prompt and sincere help to its clients.