Since its establishment in May 2011, the Open Virtualization Alliance has played a central role in driving KVM adoption among enterprise users. The organization managed to make serious headway on popularizing open source virtualization, growing into a 200-plus member consortium of cloud vendors and service providers in the process.

The latest company to join OVA is NetApp, which is credited with being the first enterprise storage vendor to embrace KMV. It therefore comes as no surprise that the firm has earned a seat on the OVA governing board alongside founding members HP, IBM, Intel and Red Hat.

As the last remaining pure-play storage vendor, NetApp represents an important piece of the open hypervisor puzzle. The OVA said in a release that the company will “continue to provide guidance to enable partners and customers that seek to use KVM as their foundation” in its new role.

“As customers move to cloud and require more openness, execution speed, and economic value, open virtualization is what delivers to customer requirements,” commented David Dale, the Director of Standards at NetApp. “After being an active contributor and leader in the KVM community for several years, NetApp is now excited to take an instrumental role as an Open Virtualization Alliance governing member to further promote open customer solutions.”

The open source community constitutes a central pillar of NetApp’s plans to build a ‘universal data platform’ atop its Data ONTAP storage operating system. As part of this initiative, the company plans to make code contributions to OpenStack and CloudStack, partner with public cloud providers, and roll out new solutions for large enterprises. One of the products that is set to make its debut in the coming months is a hypervisor translation layer that aims to simplify workload migration between disparate ONTAP deployments.