IBM Extends OpenStack Reach

At the OpenStack Summit, IBM announced it is extending the reach of its OpenStack support to now include an implementation running in beta on the IBM SoftLayer cloud as a service.

Angel Diaz, vice president of cloud architecture and technology for IBM, says this latest implementation of OpenStack is designed to complement existing IBM support for deploying the open source cloud management framework on premise and in dedicated hosting environments.

IBM also announced today that it is working with Intel to extend OpenStack to take advantage of the Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) to provide hardware monitoring and security controls.

IBM also took the opportunity afforded by the conference to engage in some bragging rights. A survey of 2,255 business and technology decision-makers conducted by Forrester Research finds that compared to its competitors twice as many organizations either use or plan to use IBM as their primary hosted private cloud platform, and nearly twice as many firms use or plan to use IBM when implementing multiple vendor cloud solutions.

“There are going to be multiple clouds that need to be connected,” said Diaz. “There is no single cloud.”

Diaz adds that one other reason that IBM has garnered so much OpenStack momentum is that customers has come to view its OpenStack distribution as a gateway to a variety of higher value added cloud services such as the IBM Watson Cloud.

But as vendors continue to rally around OpenStack integrating those clouds becomes easier. At present there are multiple distributions of OpenStack, but Diaz says that providing access to a common set of application programming interfaces greatly simplifies integration challenges across heterogeneous clouds.

For that reason IBM has provided hundreds of developers to OpenStack project that participated in 11,676 code reviews, implemented 68 blueprints and fixed 520 bugs across a total of 232,382 lines of code. IBM also claims that one of its most important contributions to OpenStack has been the development of RefStack-client compliance testing tool.

While interest in OpenStack is obviously strong, the amount of OpenStack code running in production environments remains comparatively small. But given the amount of momentum behind OpenStack it’s clearly only a matter of time before OpenStack gets deployed in production environments. The only thing not as clear is to what degree OpenStack will supplant existing proprietary frameworks or simply be deployed alongside them. In either case the amount of IT effort required to bring OpenStack into those production environments will be substantial.