At the OpenStack Design Summit & Conference in San Francisco this week, Dell launched a partner programme that will see a growing list of collaborators offer products and services around the company’s open source big data and cloud efforts.

Called the Emerging Solutions Ecosystem, the programme will allow Dell partners to sell hardware, software and services as part of the Dell Apache Hadoop Solution and the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution, while retaining a single point of contact. The first three partners are Canonical, enStratus and Mirantis, Dell said.

Supporting services

Dell’s OpenStack-based cloud offering, launched in the UK last month, integrates the OpenStack cloud operating system, Dell PowerEdge C servers, Dell’s open source Crowbar software framework and Dell services.

Canonical will provide engineering, online and professional services through the programme, while enStratus will offer its cloud infrastructure management product, Dell said. enStratus will also work with Dell to deliver cloud applications with consistent infrastructure automation, the company said.

Mirantis is to sell architecture and design services for OpenStack, cloud migration services and custom OpenStack architecture deployment.

A number of big names have announced their backing for OpenStack recently. Rackspace, which launched OpenStack with NASA in 2010, on Monday launched a host of “next generation” OpenStack products including Cloud Servers, Cloud Databases, Cloud Block Storage, Cloud Networks, Cloud Monitoring and a Control Panel.

Last week HP launched the HP Converged Cloud, which, when it becomes available in beta on 10 May, will run on an HP-baked version of OpenStack.

Criticism

The OpenStack project also has its detractors, with Citrix cancelling its Olympus OpenStack project earlier this month, saying it was “disappointed” with OpenStack’s rate of progress.

Citrix owns OpenStack rival CloudStack, which it bought from Cloud.com in July 2011.

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