EMC this week became the latest member of OpenStack, citing a growing interest in its customer base in open source cloud technologies.

Chuck Hollis, vice president and global marketing CTO at EMC, wrote in a blog post that the storage vendor is now a corporate sponsor of OpenStack, joining a growing list of sponsors including such EMC competitors as IBM, NetApp, Hewlett-Packard and Dell.

Hollis wrote that EMC has supported the cloud stack programs of VMware and Microsoft, and that OpenStack, like Linux, is maturing "into a serious enterprise operating environment."

[Related: VMware Welcomed Into OpenStack Foundation]

Hollis wrote that, while no one considers OpenStack a "shrink-wrap, bulletproof experience these days," OpenStack is on the road map of enterprise IT shops and IT service providers in one way or another.

EMC's joining OpenStack is similar to EMC's embrace of Linux several years ago, Hollis wrote. EMC in the early 2000s hadn't considered Linux a fit with EMC's traditional business model because of its open source roots, but one co-worker at EMC pulled together a Linux plan for EMC that was followed up with validation by EMC's eLab, reference architectures, APIs and interfaces.

"Once we had made the decision to fully embrace Linux, it was only a matter of a year or so, and we were mostly there: we could support our growing number of customers and partners who were starting to deploy Linux -- making it easier, making it better, and so on," he wrote.

OpenStack, like Linux, will be increasingly considered by IT organizations, which makes it important for EMC to embrace, Hollis wrote. "EMC is in the business of making our customers and partner successful. And if they're starting to look at OpenStack-based distros as one of their potential roads forward -- well, we want to be there for them," he wrote.

EMC has, in a way, already been a part of OpenStack since September, when VMware, primarily owned by EMC, joined OpenStack. VMware, a leading developer of virtualization and cloud platform technology, is in many ways a competitor to the open source nature of OpenStack. However, that changed with VMware's acquisition of software-defined networking (SDN) developer Nicira, a big contributor to OpenStack.

PUBLISHED DEC. 12, 2012