The cloud computing market is held by a few large suppliers. These include Amazon Web Services (AWS), considered by most stakeholders as a leading IaaS and Microsoft, Google and young companies seek to dethrone the platform. And then there are OpenStack for almost everyone else.

During the last two and a half years, the OpenStack platform management of public and private clouds convinced an impressive number of companies – HP, Dell, Cisco, IBM, Rackspace and others commit to Open Source solution. Each provider has a different approach to get involved in OpenStack. Some, such as Rackspace and HP, offer their own public cloud based on OpenStack code, and Dell has engaged in a similar strategy.

A Consolidated Community

VMworld is an event that highlights some of the greatest technology from VMware, but it is also an event where rivals show off their competitive advantages. Many companies are committed in favor of OpenStack. The time has come for these players to put their OpenStack implementation strategies and in particular to find customers willing to adopt the platform.

OpenStack is a multi-stakeholder open-source effort where multiple vendors including HP, IBM, Rackspace Cisco, SUSE and Canonical, are all building their own respective OpenStack distributions.

As a founding member, Red Hat validated its own OpenStack virtualization solutions at the conference. The company demonstrated its upcoming CloudForms 2.1 cloud management technology. The latest release of CloudForms introduces a number of enhancements including delegated power operations, automated event capture in OpenStack and workload discovery. It also includes self-service provisioning and reporting support.

OpenStack is a framework for building clouds. VMware showcased heterogeneous data center and cloud environments based on OpenStack. In association with VMware, Rackspace launched Dedicated VMware vCenter Server under our Rackspace Managed Virtualization service portfolio.

Dedicated vCenter gives users the ability to migrate existing VMware workloads into a Rackspace data center, while still leveraging existing tools to maintain the control, agility and governance they require. In terms of public cloud, OpenStack provides an opportunity to ensure that VMware virtual machines can run on OpenStack clouds.

OpenStack Leading the Way

The supporters of OpenStack say that with OpenStack cloud platform, they will be able to run both internal private clouds and public clouds for service providers together, thus offering an ecosystem that enable customers move their applications and workloads freely between public and private clouds and across multiple vendors.

McKenty, the co-founder and CTO of Piston Cloud, elaborated on that fact saying that it is that freedom that organizations find appealing with OpenStack. One reason is as the infrastructure continues to get bigger and bigger, companies behind OpenStack are not applying multi-tools as a multiple solution. They are able to develop and implement the right tools for specific job requirements.

VMware has remained one of the largest contributors to OpenStack and it is now one of the first to deploy the new features added to the OpenStack code as a commercial offer. Carl Eschenbach, President and Chief Operating Officer for VMWare, said VMware is taking the approach that the majority of the components they currently offer can be plugged into OpenStack architecture.

NetApp is another partner, which is commitment to the development of OpenStack and OpenCloud. Jim Sangster, senior director of solutions marketing for NetApp, said that the company is pushing their Clustered Data OnTap to help in allowing public and private cloud to work together. OpenStack is the central point of the development, and NetApp is contributing code and file services so everyone can take advantage of it.

Going forward, OpenStack’s adoption by large enterprises is going to hinge on how confident they are in support for the platform. Currently, there are a lot of players offering very similar OpenStack services and distributions.