A few hours after Talkin’ Cloud explored OpenStack’s continuing momentum, a flurry of announcements around the open source cloud platform hit my inbox. Not only has HP thrown in with the growing OpenStack community, but a former NASA CTO has formed an IaaS provider based on the platform, and Gluster released its cloud storage OpenStack Connector.

Here’s a slightly closer look at all three new announcements:

1. Hewlett-Packard: In a corporate blog entry, HP announced that it’s taking an active role in the OpenStack Community, contributing manpower and code to the platform. While specifics are vague, HP says that it sees it as an “opportunity to enable customers, partners and developers with unique infrastructure and development solutions across public, private and hybrid cloud environments.” And the tech titan is sponsoring the OpenStack Design Summit and OpenStack Conference in October 2011, to boot.

2. Gluster: The Gluster Connector for OpenStack “supports the virtual motion of the VMs within the OpenStack compute environment,” says the relevant blog entry. When I spoke to Gluster ahead of this announcement, the company was very enthused about the fact that the global namespace capability gives the potential for far greater VM portability within an OpenStack environment. Moreover, GlusterFS is entirely open standards-based, so administrators are free to switch out at any time.

3. Nebula: Finally, Nebula, the IaaS provider startup launched by former NASA Chief Technology Officer Chris Kemp, announced that it would be leveraging the OpenStack platform. It’s no surprise, given OpenStack’s NASA roots.

Those are all key milestones. But the key question Talkin’ Cloud raised earlier this week — whether or not VARs will take advantage of the opportunity OpenStack offers — remains an open one. But as more vendors sign on, Talkin’ Cloud believes OpenStack will attract more attention from VARs, managed services providers and cloud service providers.