VMware Not Yet In OpenStack Foundation

The nascent organization held its first board meeting Tuesday in San Diego and, after seven hours, decided to carry over the applications until the next meeting Oct. 15, or to a possible special meeting now under consideration.

"They [the applications] were last on the agenda and there was no time left to review them," Jonathan Bryce, OpenStack's executive director, said Thursday from the Linux Foundation's CloudOpen conference, where OpenStack held its meeting.

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Although they haven't been tapped as members of OpenStack yet, there is little doubt the companies will be accepted. The three technology vendors would give the foundation more influence as it moves ahead in a fiercely competitive market to develop open-source standards.

Started as an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud computing project by Rackspace and NASA in 2010, OpenStack has grown quickly with more than 150 companies participating in the project. Rackspace handed over the project to the newly formed OpenStack Foundation in April 2012.

VMware's decision to join the group gained particular notice as the virtualization giant will be able to make its widely used cloud platform and its virtualization products more interoperable with other cloud vendors building clock stacks.

Meanwhile, the foundation at its board meeting named as chairman, Alan Clark, director of industry initiatives, emerging standards and open source for SUSE, and Lew Tucker, vice president CTO of cloud at Cisco, as vice chairman.

PUBLISHED AUG. 30, 2012