The inaugural OpenStack Silicon Valley summit at the Computer History Museum this week has been a long time in the making, and it showed. Although hardly the first event dedicated to the fast-growing project, nor the longest, the half-day conference brought together the leading names from every corner of the community driving the development of the cloud operating system to share latest and greatest in open-source hybrid computing.

A little-known startup called Tesora Inc. stole the show with the introduction of the first commercial product based on Trove, the database service introduced with the most recent Icehouse release of OpenStack. The offering extends the core capabilities of the technology with much-needed enterprise features such as the ability to replicate information across multiple servers, which provides protection against system failures and potentially reduces the time it takes for applications to retrieve data.

Tesora DBaaS Platform Enterprise Edition also includes support for two different kinds of backup and recovery approaches and integration with a wide range of other databases, according to the company. The software made its debut on the same show floor where Mårten Mickos, the CEO of cloud management specialist Eucalyptus Inc. and a one-time vocal opponent of OpenStack, pledged allegiance to the project.

The passionate keynote, which saw the executive declare that he wants to achieve “full victory for open source,” came hot on the heels of Hewlett-Packard Co. acquiring Eucalyptus to inject more interoperability into its Helion portfolio of hybrid computing solutions, which is founded on OpenStack. Mickos’ not-so-sudden change of heart about the platform followed Piston Cloud Inc.’s introduction of the latest version of its OpenStack distro, which incorporates improvements from the Icehouse release along with a number of new homegrown features.

A live deployment of the platform was on display at the conference, while Piston Cloud founding CTO and theCUBE alumnus Joshua McKenty took to the stage alongside HP’s Monty Taylor and a number of other thought leaders to share their perspectives on OpenStack consumption models. The panelists covered the differences between the different distros and discussed best practices for deploying the software.

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