Red Hat, provider of commercial solutions built around open-source software applications, launched a preview version of its own distribution of OpenStack, an open-source architecture and operating system for cloud-infrastructure deployments, the company said earlier this week.

After two years in development, OpenStack’s commercial adoption has recently been picking up. With backing by some of the IT industry’s biggest players, the architecture is expected to create strong competition to infrastructure-cloud-market mainstays with proprietary systems like Amazon Web Services.

Brian Stevens, CTO and VP of worldwide engineering at Red Hat, said the company’s OpenStack “productization” efforts were focused on integrating Red Hat’s Linux offering for enterprises with OpenStack to create a hardened solution enterprises can use to build infrastructure clouds.

“We invite OpenStack enthusiasts and enterprises interested in the technology to download our preview and provide feedback to help us accelerate the delivery of a stable OpenStack enterprise platform for the industry,” he said.

Red Hat eventually wants to offer an enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution backed by its commercial support and access to its network of certified hardware and application vendors. Right now, however, the preview version available online is unsupported.

The plan is to have a fully supported release in 2013, Red Hat said.

The OpenStack project was started by computer scientists from the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Rackspace. The open-source cloud development project was eventually joined by many others.

Companies that now support OpenStack include Citrix, Dell, SoftLayer, AMD, Intel, Limelight, Nicira, Cisco, Brocade, Bull and many others.

Earlier this month, Rackspace launched a commercial cloud offering built on OpenStack. Its CEO Lanham Napier later said the company considered the technology to become its ticket to the infrastructure-cloud major league, where companies like Amazon Web Services and VMware currently dominate.

Red Hat is currently working with Rackspace to eventually provide fully-managed enterprise-cloud solutions together.