Australia is becoming an emerging hub of expansion for OpenStack, as the open source cloud platform has gained significant traction in the country. The young cloud market in Australia is ripe for the picking, and OpenStack has managed to make an impact.

Cloud providers Aptira and Haylix are two examples of OpenStack success stories. Aptira relies on OpenStack to provide customers like Mecurial with cloud infrastructure for their business applications. Haylix uses OpenStack Object Storage and Akamai’s content delivery network (CDN) to offer local businesses cloud-based redundant storage. Another example is NeCTAR, a case study for OpenStack, which features a 4,000-core cloud and is a project of the University of Melbourne. The project serves over 1,200 researchers around the country.

“Cloud in Australia is not as established as elsewhere in the world, and OpenStack has a lot of elbow room to be adopted and show why it is so much better than the existing proprietary offerings that are out there, none of which are locally based. It’s a great time to be in OpenStack,” said Aptira CEO Tristan Goode.

Rackspace has recognized the fast-growing OpenStack presence in Australia and has maintained a presence in the country since 2009. It recently began construction on its first Australian data center in Erskine Park in Western Sydney, which will open later this year. The owner of the data center, Digital Reality, agreed to give Rackspace 10-year operational control of the facility.

Rackspace developed OpenStack in conjunction with NASA. The open source cloud platform is now endorsed by 187 companies, including Dell, Yahoo, Intel, HP, and AT&T. OpenStack software, which is free and open source, includes layers for storage, networking, compute, and the OpenStack Dashboard.

The Australian OpenStack User Group will hold a Meetup on August 28. NeCTAR’s Cloud Architect Tom Fifield and Aptira’s Cloud Engineer Sina Sadeghi will present.