Rackspace Hosting just announced the six-month anniversary of OpenStack, the open source cloud project started by Rackspace and NASA, and that it has already grown to include 40 companies working on fighting against the emergence of proprietary cloud stacks and creating a standard way to deploy applications and connect clouds. 

Initially, Rackspace donated the code that powers its own Cloud Files and Cloud Servers products to the project, while NASA contributed its Nebula Cloud Platform. 

"From day-one Rackspace has believed industry standards emerge from widely adopted, open platforms," said Lew Moorman, president, cloud and chief strategy officer at Rackspace Hosting. "Over the past six months we have seen the OpenStack community grow, showing we are not alone in this fight. As one of the founding members we couldn’t be more excited about OpenStack’s success. We plan to continue to deploy OpenStack at Rackspace as the center of our cloud hosting options."

OpenStack, a collection of open source technologies, is currently developing two interrelated projects: OpenStack Compute and OpenStack Object Storage. As Rackspace explains:

OpenStack Compute is software to provision and manage large groups of virtual private servers, and OpenStack Object Storage is software for creating redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of commodity servers to store terabytes or even petabytes of data. The first ‘Austin’ code release was October 2010, and second ‘Bexar’ release is expected to be available for download February 3, 2011.

Among those participating in OpenStack, besides founding members Rackspace and NASA, are: Citrix, Dell, AMD, Cloud.com, Intel, and many others. You can see the full roster here.

"OpenStack has seen an incredibly fast amount of interest in the cloud community, drawing in many of the key and more interesting players, even people who ostensibly would compete with OpenStack,"  said Michael Cote, analyst at developer-focused industry analyst firm RedMonk.  "This new community has been doing a good job of building the stack, and more importantly, the ecosystem needed for an open source cloud computing platform."

Rackspace says it will continue to implement OpenStack throughout its own portfolio, as the project matures.