Rackspace and NASA’s joint open-source cloud platform dubbed OpenStack is celebrating today its 6-month anniversary.

“In just six short months, the OpenStack community has grown to forty companies, working together to fight the emergence of proprietary cloud stacks and create a standard way to deploy applications and connect clouds.  As OpenStack continues its success and matures, Rackspace plans to continue to implement OpenStack throughout the Rackspace portfolio.”

In addition to eliminating vendor lock-in in the cloud and being the platform of choice for Rackspace’s Cloud Files, OpenStack also assisted Rackspace in expanding its customer and partner base. Cloud management platform RightScale for instance is one example of such partner which was “ We were drawn to Rackspace for their reputation in cloud computing and also because of their leadership in the OpenStack project.”

Coinciding with the 6-month anniversary of OpenStack is Internap Network Services’ announcement of a new public cloud storage service dubbed XIPCloud, which is based on OpenStack Object Storage.

In addition to the OpenStack anniversary, Rackspace had also recently joined forces with cloud optimizer Akamai to expand and strengthen its offerings portfolio. Akamai features including CNAMEs, SSL and CDN delivery will be integrated with Rackspace’s Cloud Files service, to name a few. Furthermore, Rackspace had earlier acquired cloud management and monitoring company Cloudkick and launched two new enterprise products named Cloud Connect and Critical Sites.