Red Hat, Eucalyptus, Rackspace leading open source IaaS charge

The emergence of several open source Infrastructure-As-A-Service platforms must have VMware and Microsoft on edge.

Linux leader Red Hat joined the fray last week with the public debut of CloudForms, its cross platform multifaceted IaaS platform for building private and hybrid clouds. It is based on Red Hat's DeltaCloud APIs.

There are several others, namely Eucalyptus, Cloud.com and Rackspace.

Eucalyptus, which formed a partnership with Red Hat earlier this yeat to promote its own open source IaaS platform, was more than gracious about Red Hat's announcement.

Its chief executive said there are differences among the pool of open source IaaS platforms to keep in mind.

"CloudForm will indeed be an on-prem IaaS software platform[and is in the same category as Eucalyptus. CloudForms is a welcomed newcomer in this space. The key conclusion is that open source will be winning in this category," said Eucalyptus founder and former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, in an email asking for his comments on CloudForms.

"It seems to us that CloudForms was created in response to OpenStack,: Mickos said. "The main difference is that Eucalyptus follows the industry standard API (AWS EC2, S3, EBS) while  CloudForm (and OpenStack) do not," Mickos added. "There is also a difference in maturity and installed base. Eucalyptus has been production-grade for two years. We have recorded the starting up of over 25,000 Eucalyptus clouds all over the world (just last Saturday, there were 51 more)."

[editor's note: Rackspace and its partners are backing another open source IaaS platform called OpenStack.  An earlier version of this story incorrectly pointed to Rightscale as the key OpenStack backer. Eucalyptus pointed out after this article was published that it also partners with RightScale.

Red Hat claims its CloudForms platform is vendor agnostic and can run above OpenStack -- or on any hypervisor or cloud stack in the market, the company noted.