Dreamhost CEO Simon Anderson

OpenStack is supposed to connect the dots between private and public clouds, but that vision is still a long way from reality in the development community, where even trying out the framework requires users to buy their own hardware. That’s a far cry from the low barrier to entry and seamless scalability associated with infrastructure-as-a-service, a major gap that DreamHost rushed to fill last week with a new hosting option aimed specifically at making it easier to build applications against the open-source framework.

DreamCompute is the culmination of a two-year development effort that saw the provider develop a homegrown network virtualization solution called Akanda with capabilities for isolating virtual machines at the switching layer. For storage, the service makes use of Ceph, another technology developed at DreamHost that is now part of the upstream OpenStack ecosystem. The combined whole provides a highly elastic environment for running development projects, which are slowly but surely increasing in number as the project continues along its accelerating growth trajectory.

The ability to spin up OpenStack as if it were any other cloud service could prove a powerful catalyst for the emerging application ecosystem around the platform, securing DreamHost a central role within the community in the process. But the hosting provider will have to contend for that spot against EMC Corp., which hopes to bring the same kind of elasticity on-premise with the acquisition of Cloudscaling Group Inc., a provider of der of OpenStack-based infrastructure-as-a-service software.

The storage stalwart revealed the deal on Tuesday in conjunction with the purchase of two other hybrid cloud startups: services backup and recovery specialist Spanning Cloud Apps Inc. and the Intel Corp.-funded Maginatics Inc., which hatched up an infrastructure-agnostic “Software SAN” that makes it possible to create a uniform pool of object storage for distributing modern data workloads.

The technology EMC is gaining as part of the latter deal will put it up against the new on-premise version of the Cloudant database IBM Corp. obtained through the acquisition of the startup of the same name earlier this year. The tech giant unveiled the product alongside a set of complementary services for its public cloud likewise designed to help organizations rein in their exploding data troves. The most notable addition is dashDB, an alternative to Amazon.com Inc.’s Redshift data warehousing services based on Big Blue’s Netezza analytics platform.

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