A collaboration between OpenStack community members has ended up in the creation of the first ARM technology-powered OpenStack cloud as a zone in TryStack, the free sandbox intended for exploring and testing OpenStack.

There’s plenty of excitement around ARM and what it can do in the cloud computing realm, but if things go well, ARM-powered OpenStack clouds could solve some of the problems the computing style has created in data centers, said Mark Collier, vice president of marketing and business development for OpenStack at Rackspace. “ARM-powered OpenStack clouds attack these problems in a fundamental way, by combining a radically more efficient chip architecture with the flexible OpenStack cloud operating system designed to manage them at scale,” he said in a prepared statement.

That said, without the channel, all this work may be for naught if there is no channel partner buy-in, noted Pund-IT‘s principal analyst Charles King.

“While there’s been a great deal of chatter about the prospects for ARM-based servers, developers and other members of the channel community will be crucial to those platforms’ success,” King said. “That’s mainly because of the need to recompile and retool existing applications and other solutions, efforts that will be essentially impossible unless channel players truly believe in the bright future espoused by ARM vendors and proponents.”

It’s an old story in the IT industry, and it just goes to show that without a proper partner ecosystem and channel interest, a technology that seems promising can end up ignored and soon forgotten.

The launch of this ARM-based OpenStack cloud is a step forward and presents free and easy access to developers to explore and test workloads on the servers, said Ian Ferguson, director of servers systems and ecosystems at ARM, in a prepared statement. The ability to do so comes as a result of the efforts made by OpenStack community members Calxeda, Canonical and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ).

“Adding ARM-based servers to the TryStack dev/test cloud will help accelerate the development of the ARM server ecosystem,” said Karl Freund, vice president of marketing at Calxeda, in a prepared statement. “There is massive demand from end users, ISVs and members of the open source community to access this new technology, and TryStack will enable access to both the Calxeda-based servers, and the OpenStack APIs on ARM.”