IIBM announced that all of its cloud services and software will be based on an open cloud architecture in order to ensure that innovation in cloud computing is not hampered by locking businesses into proprietary islands of insecure and difficult-to-manage offerings. As the first step, IBM unveiled a new private cloud offering based on the open sourced OpenStack software that significantly speeds and simplifies managing an enterprise-grade cloud. Based on customer-driven requirements, the new software, called IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator, gives clients greater flexibility by removing the need to develop specific interfaces for different cloud services. With the new software, companies can quickly combine and deploy various cloud services onto the cloud infrastructure by lining up the compute, storage and network resources with an easy-to-use graphical interface.
Eric Knorr, Editor in Chief at InfoWorld, writes about the significance of IBM’s announcement on the InfoWorld website. “IBM is devoting the necessary money and resources and boasts an impressive track record of cultivating open source communities: It built Eclipse from the ground up and was highly instrumental in the success of Linux and Apache,” comments Knorr.
Read Knorr’s article, “What IBM's embrace of OpenStack really means,” here.
Read the full IBM announcement here.