The vendor-agnostic, open-source cloud has been getting a lot of attention from both customers and companies that are developing initiatives around this topic.  Amazon, Microsoft, Rackspace and OpenStack are among those who are leading this growing trend, but they’re not alone.

ElasticStack is a 2008 startup that is expanding in the U.S and Europe, offering companies an inclusive package deal to create their cloud deployment – whether it’s an on-premise utility cloud or an extension to their web host’s existing offerings portfolio.

“ElasticStack is offering a turnkey set of tools that includes a brandable control panel and billing system, cluster management API making it possible for customers to customize how an ElasticStack Cloud is seen by users and a KVM-based virtual server environment.”

ElasticStack’s bundle can probably prove to be very useful for the right client, but it still has a lot of competition to face when climbing up the market share ladder.

Gluster, for example is growing in its own right. Its latest client is biometric signature verification solutions provider CIC. Open-source is just as important for the company as the performance improvements, similarly to many others that choose these type of solutions.

We’ve had a lot of updates from the industry leaders too, starting with OpenStack.  The open cloud OS initiative has been greatly benefiting from Hewlett-Packard and Dell’s new software-driven directives, which just now began to spread into software and the cloud. Dell launched an infrastructure offering last month powered by OpenStack and its Crowbar installer. Just three days later, Hewlett-Packard was swift to announce it has joined the OpenStack community as well.

Because of their rivalry extending to the big data sector, HP and Dell have been busy as well. The latter and Cloudera announced a Hadoop cluster integrating Dell servers and the Cloudera distribution.