Cloud.com, a provider of open source private and public cloud computing software, on Wednesday announced it is collaborating with leaders in open source and cloud computing on OpenStack, an open source cloud platform designed to foster the emergence of technology standards and cloud interoperability in both the hosting industry and the enterprise. The initiative was launched by Rackspace and includes key technology contributions from NASA’s Nebula platform as well as broad industry support from leading technology companies such as Citrix. (see related release from July 19).

As a founding member of the OpenStack initiative, Cloud.com has committed to engage with the community, collaborate on standards projects and contribute code that enhances the community efforts around cloud orchestration and management. In the short term, Cloud.com is planning to adopt the OpenStack Object Storage platform into its Cloud.com CloudStack product, allowing the company to immediately contribute towards the advancement of the project on behalf of its customers. Cloud.com will also be adding the OpenStack API implementation to the CloudStack Common Cloud Framework, enabling customers and developers to leverage their existing cloud deployments. As the OpenStack community continues to grow, Cloud.com will work with the other members to prioritize how and where to continue to contribute to meet the needs of the industry and their customers.

“Any effort to bring together leaders with like minds to help drive open standards and interoperability in the cloud is critical to our success and important that we participate in,” said Sheng Liang, founder and CEO of Cloud.com. “This initiative is good for our industry and great for our customers. Cloud.com is leading the delivery of open source cloud computing technologies and is excited to be one of the founding members both contributing and commercializing technologies developed as part of the OpenStack initiative.”

Cloud interoperability issues coupled with perceived vendor lock-in and lack of common development environments represent a significant roadblock in the adoption of infrastructure cloud services. At the same time, the community of cloud developers is looking for a standard framework to end the fragmentation of application interfaces and ease deployment of services. OpenStack is bringing all of the leading players together to drive a program, with investment and resource, to address the standards and interoperability issues while driving innovation and acceleration of open cloud technologies.

“OpenStack will enable the open source community to re-assert its claim to leadership in cloud computing,” said Simon Crosby, CTO, Datacenter and Cloud Division, Citrix Systems. “The powerful community of collaborators – including Cloud.com, Citrix, NASA, and Rackspace – ensures the project will deliver a free, open source, hypervisor agnostic, standards-based cloud infrastructure that will meet the needs of enterprises and service providers alike. Cloud.com's CloudStack instantly turns any deployment of Citrix XenServer into a fully functional, self-service cloud, and Citrix looks forward to continuing to collaborate closely with them and the OpenStack community to provide full support for the XenServer platform and our other cloud-enabling products.”

“This is one of the first implementations of OpenStack outside of Rackspace or NASA, and a strong validation that OpenStack technology is ready to be commercialized and deployed by a team of experts like Cloud.com,” said Jim Curry, vice president at Rackspace, who is leading the OpenStack initiative. “Cloud.com is committed to being an active participant in the OpenStack community, and will be using their experience deploying the OpenStack technology with customers to contribute to the advancement of the project.”

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