Threatened by AWS, traditional enterprise vendors are pushing OpenStack in a bid to secure a slice of tomorrow’s IT market. IBM, a staunch supporter of the project, recently teamed up with with an emerging systems integrator to make open source private clouds more transparent – and much more viable at scale.

Big Blue’s SoftLayer division donated 1,500 bare-metal instances to “improve scalability and perform other previously impossible OpenStack testing” with Rally, a newly released benchmark-as-a-service solution from Mirantis. The software combines the functionality of several open source tools to let enterprise users test and deploy their OpenStack environments with greater efficiency, the company says.

While IBM and Mirantis are working on making the open cloud more attractive for the enterprise, Dell is taking a proprietary approach to helping admins be more productive. The hardware maker on Wednesday updated Active Systems Manager with additional third party support, streamlined deployment functions and an “enhanced user interface that provides an intuitive, end-to-end infrastructure and workload automation experience.

The release of Active Systems Manage followed the debut of Hewlett Packard’s Propel, a freemium IT transformation suite that gives end-users improved access to apps and services. The trial version comes with comes with a standard cloud catalog, a knowledge base and a newsfeed, while the premium edition adds integration with on-premise software and “advanced authentication methods” like single sign-on.

The Austin, Texas-based is Zenoss offers its own twist on IT automation with a unified monitoring solution that can spot technical issues across physical, virtual and cloud-based infrastructure. The firm recently rolled out two plugins that extend this functionality to Windows Server and Azure environments, “reducing complexity and downtime and lowering the cost of IT Operations” according to CTO Alan Conley.