Cloud host Rackspace will start offering training courses for OpenStack, delivered by the Rackspace Cloud Builders, the company’s core development team responsible for the NASA Nebula Cloud Platform and the Rackspace Cloud.

OpenStack is an open-source cloud OS initiative Rackspace kick started with NASA a little over a year ago, and since gained an ecosystem of dozens of partners.

The initial five-day training course titled Fundamentals Training for OpenStack will be offered before the OpenStack Design Summit in  Boston, the Rackspace campus in London and at the Dell campus in Austin. The company said additional locations will be added.

Here’s some details about what attendees can expect:

“Two days of the fundamentals course will focus on OpenStack Object Storage, open source software that can create petabytes of distributed, reliable storage, and three days will focus on OpenStack Compute, open source software used to provision and manage large networks of virtual machines.”

Rackspace is working on further fleshing out OpenStack’s potential, and these training courses are one way of extending that to companies, whether customers or partners. The latest to join an existing list of over 100 partners is NEC, a Japanese networking company. OpenStack was also one of the biggest topics back at Oscon 2011 last month, when Gluster announced its first contribution to the project, a piece of code that integrates GlusterFS with OpenStack to free up VMs and data within a deployment.

Cloudera, the biggest distributor of open-source big data management platform Hadoop, made a similar move earlier this month – the company announced the Cloudera Connect Partner Program. It includes a certification suite for Apache Hadoop, the first of its kind, and a Partner Portal that comes with marketing tools, technical training material and more.