Blue Box Pitches Turnkey Private OpenStack Cloud

Blue Box, a Seattle-based cloud infrastructure company, has teamed up with system integrator Alliance Technology Group to bring to market an on-premise version of its hosted OpenStack private cloud service.

While popularity of private and public cloud services hosted in providers’ data centers is on the rise, lots of customers still have applications that need to be hosted in data center environments they control. On-premise private cloud is a good option for companies that need that control but want to take advantage of the flexibility of cloud infrastructure.

The new Blue Box offering, which the company expects to bring to market in the second quarter, is similar to the offering by Metacloud, a company recently acquired by Cisco. Blue Box CTO Jesse Proudman said he considered Metacloud’s the only offering on the market competing with his company’s upcoming product.

There are numerous companies that have OpenStack distributions and that help customers stand up private OpenStack clouds in their data centers. The Blue Box product is different in that it is a full hardware-and-software package that is fully managed by the provider.

Customers that simply deploy OpenStack software packages find the process of operating their environments difficult, according to Proudman. “They want to put workloads on top of clouds, not run the clouds themselves,” he said.

Another point of differentiation is the company’s hosted private cloud service, which will be able to integrate with the in-house environments.

The private clouds will be manageable via the provider’s web-based Box Panel interface. They will be linked to the company’s operations center.

The hardware stack will consist of Juniper network gear, Dell servers, and Nimble storage arrays. Blue Box plans to offer KVM hypervisor as one virtualization option and Docker containers as another option for customers that want to spin up application containers on bare-metal servers. Users will be able to use OpenStack APIs to boot and manage Docker containers, Proudman said.

The offering will be based on Juno, the latest release of OpenStack.