HP Gives OpenStack Significant Backing in the Cloud Wars

Just yesterday, in our post "OpenStack's Partnerships Give it a Leg Up in the Cloud Race," we noted that OpenStack has so many heavy-hitting partnerships at this point that it is emerging as a strong open contender to other cloud computing platforms. Now, HP's vice president of cloud services Emil Sayegh has announced the company's "intent to join and support" OpenStack in a blog post. The move is significant because it immediately follows Dell's announcement that it will offer hardware bundled with OpenStack. That means the two largest PC manufacturers are betting on an open source-based cloud platform provider.

According to the HP post:

"HP is taking an active role in the OpenStack community and we see this as an opportunity to enable customers, partners and developers with unique infrastructure and development solutions across public, private and hybrid cloud environments.  In fact look for members of our cloud development teams that are already actively participating on OpenStack’s Launchpad and irc channel (#openstack on irc.freenode.net).  We are also sponsoring the OpenStack Design Summit and OpenStack Conference in October ’11, where we look forward to sharing and engaging with you further to bring about the future of open, interoperable cloud services."

One of the most important things to notice about HP's announcement is that it mentions "public, private and hybrid cloud environments" as important to why the company made the decision to back OpenStack. HP, like Dell, has enterprises in mind, and enterprises are focused on much more than just public cloud deployments. They want private cloud applications, and they want to manage public and private cloud deployments seamlessly.

It's not clear yet exactly what Dell and HP plan to do with OpenStack's platform, but it seems certain that we'll see both servers and PCs loaded with OpenStack software.

Along with OpenStack's many other partnerships, these signals of support from the two largest PC manufacturers have to make VMware and other players, such as Eucalyptus Systems, concerned about the future of OpenStack, which facilitates cloud deployments based on most popular hypervisors.

We're likely to see more from HP and Dell soon regarding their specific bundling plans.