Cloud Computing: VMware – OpenStack friend, foe, or frenemy?

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Marshall.

OpenStack was originally started in 2010 as an IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) cloud computing joint project between Rackspace and NASA. The reins have since been turned over to the new OpenStack Foundation, which is now finally official, complete with a 24-member board chaired by Suse executive and Linux Foundation director Alan Clark. The group has grown to more than 5,600 individual members across 87 countries and 850 different organizations, and is financial backed by more than $10 million in funding.

The question now is, can this open source cloud project really thrive and survive in this competitive market? The community-at-large is watching to see how the foundation handles itself now that there are so many competing interests within its own membership — especially with the recently added and most controversial new member, VMware…

The OpenStack Foundation is already taking shape as a compelling force in cloud computing, and has an admirable mission of enabling any organization to create and offer cloud computing services while running on standard hardware. The group had been getting early traction behind its united front for creating a competitive open source cloud stack before proprietary software vendors like VMware could swallow the market, like it had done with server virtualization…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/d/virtualization/vmware-openstack-friend-foe-or-frenemy-203633