IBM, Red Hat to Join OpenStack Foundation

The open-source OpenStack cloud infrastructure stack has gained a number of additional powerful allies, as IBM and Red Hat have both agreed to support the OpenStack Foundation, organizers behind the soon-to-be-created organization announced Wednesday.

Both companies have agreed to join the foundation as platinum members, meaning they will contribute US$500,000 per year for the next three years. The companies will also contribute code changes to the software stack as well.

In addition to these two companies, AT&T, Canonical, Hewlett-Packard, Nebula, Rackspace and SUSE are also planning to sign on as platinum members to the foundation.

Last year, Rackspace, which has been overseeing the OpenStack development process, announced that it would spin off the OpenStack project as a stand-alone foundation. Since then, the project's managers and contributors have been working out the details of how the foundation would work.

The group expects to make more announcements about the foundation's progress next week at the OpenStack Spring Conference, being held in San Francisco.

With the legal help of the committed sponsors, the organizers behind the foundation will write a set of bylaws for the organization, which then will be posted for community review. They expect to ratify the final draft by September.

A number of other companies have pledged their support as well at a lower level, including Cisco, ClearPath Networks, Cloudscaling, Dell, DreamHost, NetApp, Piston Cloud Computing and Yahoo. This second tier, called the gold level, requires contributions between $50,000 and $200,000 a year, depending on company revenue.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com