Yesterday cloud host Rackspace crossed a fairly major milestone, and the same can be said of the OpenStack initiative that kicked off just two years ago. The company said that the Rackspace Cloud service is now powered by the open cloud OS, a move that is already proving to be a very significant one for the ecosystem.

Nicira is one of the companies involved in this push and can be partially credited with the creation of Cloud Networking, a new VLAN-as-a-service.  The offering is based on OpenStack Quantum, a so-called vSwitch component, and Nicira’s Network Virtualization Platform (NVP).  The latter connects to the platform via a plug-in.

“Nicira not only makes truly flexible multi-tenant clouds possible, it makes the economics incredibly compelling,” said John Engates, chief technology officer at Rackspace.

“Combining our award-winning Fanatical Support(R) with OpenStack Quantum and Nicira, we can now deploy and configure a secure private network and fully-featured cloud in seconds, a promise that is very powerful for enterprises large and small.”

OpenStack is in the center of the open-source cloud trend, and as the brainchild of Rackspace and NASA, this joint effort is what eventually what put this vision on the table. The difference between now and two years ago adds up to several generations of the software and a few hundred partners, including Infochimps.

This particular tidbit is notable thanks to the fact Infochimps managed to release an announcement of its own right after Rackspace’s big update.  The big data firm said it has extended API-based support to the OpenStack-powered cloud services across a big chunk of its portfolio.  That includes the Infochimps Platform, the Dashpot virtualization layer that’s designed to run on top of it, and the Ironfan provisioning tool.