Two of the bigger names in cloud computing, VMware and Rackspace, have released low-cost or free trial versions of their cloud offerings. 

The news follows an announcement by Red Hat earlier that it too would offer a free version of its cloud computing platform. Red Hat's and Rackspace's offerings help users build private clouds based on the OpenStack software code, while VMware is offering a free trial version of its vCloud software, which allows access to public cloud resources.  The moves signal an effort by cloud service providers to entice businesses that may have virtualised environments to expand to a public or private cloud, one analyst says.

Source: Tech Central