EMC follows VMware, rest of world into OpenStack

EMC has joined the OpenStack open-source cloud effort. The news hits three months after VMware — 80 percent owned by EMC — signaled its intention to back the initiative. EMC joins as a corporate-level member while VMware is a higher-level gold member.

The news was posted to a blog by EMC global marketing CTO Chuck Hollis late Tuesday. Hollis wrote that OpenStack, like Linux before it, has “matured in to 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 three 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.”