OpenStack: DreamHost Targets Amazon EC2 With DreamCompute

Not all of the OpenStack news this week is coming out of the OpenStack Summit in San Diego. Take DreamHost‘s announcement of an OpenStack-based cloud computing platform that the web hosting and cloud services company is hoping will give Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) EC2 a run for its money.

DreamCompute was developed to be a highly scalable and cost-effective IaaS platform built around OpenStack. According to the company, the new cloud platform was designed for Internet entrepreneurs and developers as an EC2 competitor. Using DreamCompute, customers will be able to do a variety of things in the cloud, such as power web and mobile applications, do testing and development and run Big Data analytics.

DreamHost’s claim to fame in the IT world is as a web hosting provider, but the company has been building out its cloud services offerings. Earlier in the year, it struck deals with both Nicira for its Network Virtualization Platform and web security firm CloudFlare. In addition to its dedicated web hosting services, DreamHost also provides to customers cloud object storage with DreamObjects.

The new DreamCompute cloud computing platform includes several open source solutions to power it. Not just OpenStack, but also scalable Ceph block storage and Nicira network virtualization. DreamHost aimed to create a highly scalable cloud platform that is quick to provision, resilient and secure. Pricing has yet to be announced, but that should be coming over the next few weeks.

“DreamCompute has been engineered from the operating system up to deliver the next generation cloud compute service that developers are craving,” said Simon Anderson, CEO of DreamHost, in a prepared statement.

Targeting Amazon EC2 specifically may be a bit of an uphill battle for DreamHost, and there are already plenty of competitors, both large and small, entering the market and vying for a piece of the cloud computing platform pie. More competitors are likely over the next couple of years, and it’ll be interesting to see how the market expands and what platforms customers end up settling on.