Nearly two years ago, Rackspace and NASA bravely took on a new mission: unifying their separate efforts of cloud storage and cloud compute under the umbrella project of OpenStack. Publishing the source code under an open source license, and investing significant time and resources to catalyze a world-wide community of users and developers to shape the future of the OpenStack project.

Late last year, Rackspace declared its intent to move the stewardship of the project to a neutral governing body. Today, it announces the corporate members who have expressed their intention to become founding members of the foundation, and we are proud to say that Red Hat will participate as one of the foundation’s Platinum Members. In the coming weeks we will participate in the drafting committee to finalize the foundation structure and we look forward to its eventual ratification.

While Red Hat has contributed extensively as part of the OpenStack development community, we are enthusiastic to now become an official member. OpenStack will now join an open source architecture that has been redefining our customers’ IT for the past ten years:

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux: The unifying operating system of bare metal, virtualization, public and private cloud.
  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization: Secure, high-performance datacenter virtualization.
  • Red Hat CloudForms: Hybrid cloud management.
  • OpenStack: IaaS for private and public cloud.
  • Red Hat OpenShift: The enterprise PaaS for the cloud.
  • Red Hat Storage: Hybrid cloud storage.
  • Red Hat Enterprise MRG: Messaging, Realtime and Grid for high-performance computing.
  • Red Hat JBoss Middleware Solutions: Comprehensive portfolio of middleware software.
     

In the coming months we will share more details on what this means for our partners and our customers.

We have long believed that open source was the future for enterprise infrastructure and the open cloud, and today, thanks to the pioneering work of Rackspace and NASA, the future just got a whole lot closer.