Canonical is claiming a victory after the maker of expensive printer Ink, HP signed up to use Ubuntu to run its OpenStack clouds. Canonical CEO Jane Silber announced that Ubuntu is a good choice for OpenStack clouds as it is both flexible and scalable as a guest OS, while also being a secure host system.

HP joined the open source cloud group in July of this year and last month, the company announced a private beta programme for HP Cloud Services. It uses OpenStack's Compute (Nova) and Object Storage (Swift) technology.

OpenStack is an open source cloud platform and has more than 100 member companies, including AMD, Canonical, Cisco, Citrix, Dell, HP and Intel. Ubuntu is a fading star in the Linux world, so its choice by a big name like HP is good news for the outfit.