Open-source is one of the biggest trends in IT, sweeping through the cloud as new standards and demands develop. Improved integration and cost-efficiency are huge benefits and proprietary offerings lack in comparison.  That being said, Gluster just hopped on one of the biggest bandwagon in the segment. The open source storage virtualization software vendor today announced it has joined the OpenStack community – the open cloud imitative developed by Rackspace, NASA and others.

“ Gluster, the leading provider of scale-out, open source storage solutions for public and private clouds, today announced that it has joined the OpenStack community. It is Gluster’s intention to develop enhancements to OpenStack Storage offerings that give users redundancy, unlimited scale and high availability.”

According to the release, Gluster intends to unveil the first update to its first OpenStack code contribution at April 26th OpenStack Developer Conference which will be held in Santa Clara, Calif. The company, being an Openstack Sponsor, will make financial contributions as well as additional code contributions. Earlier today Gluster also announced a partnership with cloud management company RightScale to provide it with storage virtualization products for its platform.

While other open cloud companies and initiatives are steadily growing, OpenStack seems to racing forward on more than one level. Dell, Opscode and Rackspace recently teamed-up to demonstrate the first example of fully automated provisioning applied to a multi-node OpenStack cloud at the Cloud Connect conference. Earlier, Rackspace released the Bexar code release brining IPv6, Hyper-V, iSCSI with XenAPI, XenServer, raw disk image support and more to OpenStack.

The open cloud is gaining momentum as more and more companies join the movement, and continue developing newer and more advanced offerings. Hewlett-Packard CEO Leo Apotheker also sees this market’s potential, and whilst his company is going through a strategic shift towards software, the Register reports Apotheker may be planning some open source cloud acquisitions.

“Apotheker said that HP would offer raw infrastructure clouds as well as platform clouds – what used to be called “middleware,” as he put it – but offered no details on how HP would do this without competing with the big cloudy providers that buy its servers… On top of that will be platform services for building, testing, and deploying cloud services (what we used to call “applications”), and in front of this will be an “open cloud marketplace” for generic consumer, SMB, and enterprise applications as well as industry vertical applications.”