Today Dell announced a new offering that is based on Cactus, the latest version of open-source cloud operating system OpenStack. The Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution is a combo of Dell PowerEdge C Series servers, which are designed for web hosts, the OpenStack OS and Dell’s Crowbar installer. The company promises the open-source framework can reduce deployment time from days to hours. On top of these core components, the bundle also comes with services from Dell and Rackspace Cloud Builders.

“With support for the two top public compute cloud application programming interfaces from Amazon and Rackspace, as well as extensive support for all of the major virtualization technologies from Citrix, Microsoft, and VMware, OpenStack and the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution provide all the components necessary to deliver a comprehensive cloud offering.”

Dell is expanding into the cloud, as is long time rival Hewlett-Packard. Cloud storage is important for Dell in this regard, and it’s where an earlier buy, EqualLogic, comes into play. Travis Vigil, executive director of the product family discussed this topic, and how virtualization storage helps optimize performance and resources overall.

OpenStack also had an update of its own, gaining more partners in support of its project. Virtulization management software maker Convirture announced it has joined the OpenStack community, making it the latest member in a list of companies that is getting very close to reaching the 100 contributors milestone.

Open-source has been a growing presence in the cloud market for quite some time now, and the same can be said of big data. More specifically, data management platform Apache Hadoop and its key distributors are spearheading this trend, in addition to several other companies. One of them is Zettaset, a startup that offers a platform that simifies the user of Hadoop while letting users choose the distribution they want to work with. It recently raised $3 million in funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and EPIC Ventures.