IBM Rolls Out Private OpenStack Cloud for On-Prem Data Centers

IBM announced this week it will now sell full-package private OpenStack cloud infrastructure companies can deploy in a data center of their choice. It can be a corporate data center on a company campus, a leased colocation facility, or one of IBM’s cloud data centers around the world.

OpenStack, the package of open source software for creating cloud infrastructure, is an alternative to proprietary private cloud options by VMware and others or public cloud services by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, or IBM itself. However, OpenStack is notoriously difficult to set up for enterprises using internal IT resources, which has led to numerous vendors offering professional services around it.

IBM gained its private OpenStack cloud capabilities by acquiring private cloud company Blue Box earlier this year. Following the acquisition, in August, the company rolled out a private OpenStack cloud option hosted at its SoftLayer data centers.

IBM made the announcement at this week’s OpenStack Summit in Tokyo.

IBM’s public cloud services, offered under the SoftLayer brand, are compatible with OpenStack via APIs, but not all companies can use public cloud for a variety of reasons, be it security, compliance, or performance concerns. IBM is going after these customers, offering them private cloud that can also integrate with its public cloud offerings, both SoftLayer and Bluemix, IBM’s Platform-as-a-Service cloud based on Cloud Foundry, an open source PaaS technology.

The company rolled out a private version of Bluemix earlier this month as well.

In its announcement, IBM cited a recent study by the market research firm Forrester that found that most enterprises expect to rely more on on-premise cloud as part of their IT infrastructure strategy but did not have the operational expertise to do it.