Symform co-founder and President Praerit Garg says there's something wrong with the way data is being stored in public clouds today, namely that public cloud providers rely on data centers, which are expensive and have inherent security risks.

In what will be one of the first large scale OpenStack commercial deployments, hosting company Rackspace is moving its server and other hosting services to the OpenStack API (application programming interface).

Rackspace has unveiled an "early access" limited-availability edition of its updated public cloud environment, built on the open source cloud platform OpenStack. Dubbed simply Rackspace Cloud, its features include cloud servers, databases, block storage, networks, and monitoring, as well as a new control panel.

A new development platform announced Thursday by startup Heirloom Computing will allow companies to move legacy applications written in the venerable, but still-viable, COBOL language, which often run on mainframes, to a variety of cloud computing services.

The latest from Next Digital, Actian, SugarCRM, and WatchGuard Technologies; news in appointments, partnerships, and achievements

Infrastructure-as-a-service is gaining traction in the enterprise with customers lauding the flexibility that it delivers. However, there is still that nagging concern about vendor lock-in.

It's been an interesting past few weeks for OpenStack.

IBM and Red Hat could soon be joining the ranks of OpenStack supporters, giving the open source Cloud project a big boost.

Coupa, a 2006 startup that helps more than 200 customer companies manage purchasing and procurement, doesn't own any IT infrastructure - it is run completely from the Amazon Web Service Cloud.

Rackspace will help enterprises build private clouds using the OpenStack cloud operating system, the company announced Tuesday. Meanwhile, Dell is seeking enterprises and service providers for proof-of-concept OpenStack trials with its Dell PowerEdge C family of servers.