EMC has joined the OpenStack Foundation. The news hits 3 months after VMware — 80 percent owned by EMC — signaled its intention to back the open source cloud effort. EMC joins as a corporate level member while VMware is a higher-level Gold member.
The news was posted in a blog by EMC global marketing CTO Chuck Hollis late Tuesday. As for EMC’s rationale, Hollis wrote that OpenStack, like Linux before it has “ matured into a serious enterprise operating environment” and “the OpenStack Foundation is the key industry nexus point for the evolution of a growing number of different-flavored distributions and editions.”
NASA and Rackspace launched OpenStack about 3 years ago to be an alternative to Amazon Web Services and VMware. Since then it has gained a ton of vendor support with Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, IBM, and Red Hat all joining up. Citrix was a big proponent but last April started pushing CloudStack as an Apache-backed OpenStack alternative. In fact it’s almost easier to count the IT giants who are not in the OpenStack fold — that would be Microsoft, Amazon and –until yesterday — EMC.
As Hollis noted:
“Over time, we believe that OpenStack-based distributions will be considered by more IT organizations — just like Linux before it. The per-customer specifics will vary widely based on all sorts of factors, but it’s hard to argue the macro trend.”
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