OpenStack is an open source operating system for public and private clouds running on commodity hardware.

"Oracle is pleased to join the OpenStack Foundation and plans to integrate OpenStack capabilities into a broad set of Oracle products and cloud services," said Oracle chief corporate architect Edward Screven.

"Our goal is to give customers greater choice and flexibility in how they use Oracle products and services in public and private clouds," he added.

The has announced plans to integrate OpenStack management components to Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, Oracle VM, Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance, Oracle Infrastructure as a Service, the ZS3 Series, Axiom storage systems, and StorageTek tape systems.

Also on the drawing board are OpenStack compatibility with Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle Compute Cloud Service and Oracle Storage Cloud Service, and Oracle Compute Cloud Service compatibility with OpenStack Nova.

Oracle joins companies such as Avaya, Brocade, EMC, F5 Networks, Fujitsu and Western Digital as a corporate sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation.

This is the third level of sponsorship, and is basically about providing the Foundation with additional funding.

Gold members are the second tier, and in addition to financial support "pledge strategic alignment to the OpenStack mission."

They include Cisco, Dell, Hitachi, Huawei, Intel, NEC, NetApp and VMware.

At the top of the tree are the eight platinum members - AT&T, Canonical, HP, IBM, Nebula, Rackspace, Red Hat, and SUSE.

Platinum members provide a significant portion of the Foundation's funding, align their company strategies with OpenStack, commit full-time resources to the project, and have a seat on the Foundation's board of directors.