There have been a lot of open-source cloud updates this week, both from large players such as Dell and Microsoft, to smaller startups that just emerged out of funding rounds.

The first highlight comes from the electronics giant, with the launch of the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution. The IaaS offering is designed to run on Dell PowerEdge C servers and comes with the now one year-old Crowbar, an installer that is available in an open-source or paid version.  Reference architecture designed to work on PowerEdge C machines and services provided by Dell, and Rackspace Cloud Builder is also a part of the Dell-.OpenStack Cloud Solution bundle.
OpenStack is being adopted on a wider and wider scale as it expands, and as its partner base of almost 100 companies continues to grow. One of the most recent to join the open cloud OS’s ecosystem is Convirture, a startup that develops the ConVi open source virtualized environments manager.

Gluster, a developer of open source storage solutions and an existing member of the OpenStack community, also had a big update this week. Only a week after it announced GlusterFS 3.3, the company unveiled a new offering, its first major OpenStack release.  The Gluster Connector, which will be available under an Apache license, connects GlusterFS to the OpenStack Compute block storage controller, making it the deployment’s file system. This allows users to change the number of VMs in their cloud, and enables the virtual movement of these VMs.

Microsoft is also looking to gain a share of the open-source cloud market. So much so it recently challenged Hadoop by creating its own MapR-based alternative. Daytona is the name of the offering, which also powers a data-analytics-as-a-service called Excel DataScope. The two products are designed to greatly similify data analytics in Microsoft Azure by implementing a “very simple, easy-to-use programming interface,” and even a step-by-step tutorial for developers and data scientists.