Rackspace reveals the strategy behind its ‘open cloud’ vision

Cloud computing giant Rackspace has announced plans to partner up with the leading providers of open source data centers.

As a founding member of the Open Compute Project, the company’s goal is to make it cheaper and more energy efficient to power the world’s Internet.

Facebook launched the initiative in April 2011 as a pledge to share custom data center designs, and scale computing infrastructure in the most efficient and economical way possible.

At the fourth Open Compute Summit in Santa Clara, Calif. today, executives at companies like Facebook, Intel, and Rackspace pooled together their knowledge and resources. They also announced hardware designs, new jobs, and upcoming partnerships.

Related: VentureBeat’s Jolie O’Dell is reporting live from the Open Compute Summit. Read her coverage here. 

“Rackspace will support those companies and organizations that share our vision for an open cloud,” said COO, Mark Roenigk. In an email statement, he stressed that the San Antonio, Tx.-based competitor to Amazon Web Services is “committed” to supporting the efforts of “like-minded companies who are dedicated to open standards.”

Roenigk delivered a keynote address at the summit and emphasized the company’s mission to support engineers who are designing more energy-efficient servers, storage, and hardware for scalable computing. The open-source hardware movement is still in its early days, so the strategy may well extend far beyond partnering with suppliers of next-generation open source data centers.

Still, the pioneers of this movement remain optimistic about Open Compute and where its partners will go next. “We’re seeing signs that the industry is changing, it’s becoming more open,” remarked Facebook hardware chief Frank Frankovsky in his opening keynote. “Suppliers are seeing that there’s a radical change in this space.”