Archivo de la categoría: Blue Box

Blue Box, Cloudsoft, Duncan Johnston-Watt, IBM, Infrastructure as a Service, Jesse Proudman, News & Analysis

IBM boosts OpenStack cloud presence with Blue Box integration

IBM has integrated Blue Box, which offers managed private OpenStack clouds on-premise, into its own datacentres

IBM has integrated Blue Box, which offers managed private OpenStack clouds on-premise, into its own datacentres

Less than a few months after buying the managed OpenStack-based private cloud provider Blue Box IBM announced it has integrated the company’s technology into its SoftLayer infrastructure.

IBM customers now have access to Blue Box’s dedicated cloud offering through its cloud datacentres, which the company is pitching as a way to complement and ease provisioning of resources in the public cloud.

The company also announced that Cloudsoft, an open source application management company, will operate its Application Management Platform (AMP) via Blue Box Cloud.

“I’ve been impressed by the way the IBM and Blue Box engineering teams have collaborated to quickly bring Blue Box Cloud to a worldwide infrastructure platform,” said Jesse Proudman, chief technology officer at Blue Box. “Today, we’ve taken a big step toward our goal of delivering private clouds to customers anywhere in the world—and we’re offering deployment timelines that are unheard of within traditional private cloud.”

Duncan Johnston-Watt, chief executive of Cloudsoft said: “Implementing Cloudsoft AMP on Blue Box Cloud across IBM Cloud datacentres will allow us to meet the increased demand from customers for hybrid cloud solutions built on OpenStack. The combination of Blue Box’s best-in-class OpenStack service and IBM Cloud’s global footprint and legendary private network will enable us to model, deploy and manage our customers’ business critical applications and services worldwide.”

Blue Box, Cisco, Hilton Romansky, IBM, Jim Comfort, News & Analysis, Open Source, Piston

Cisco, IBM spend big in OpenStack-focused land grab

Cisco and IBM have both acquired OpenStack vendors this week

Cisco and IBM have both acquired OpenStack vendors this week

Cisco and IBM have both signed deals to acquire OpenStack vendors this week, with Cisco acquiring Piston Cloud Computing, a firm specialising in OpenStack-based private cloud software and IBM buying up managed private cloud provider Blue Box.

Piston offers what it calls Piston CloudOS, a supped up version of OpenStack for private clouds alongside custom cluster management and monitoring software and APIs. Underneath that sits a custom Linux micro-OS that contains all of the necessary code to run CloudOS; the company said it can be characterized as a “bare-metal operating system that is tailor-made for pools of hyper-converged, commodity resources.”

Cisco said Piston will help it deliver on its Intercloud vision, which sees a Cisco-based set of cloud services that can federate with one another; OpenStack seems increasingly to be at the heart of that effort.

“Paired with our recent acquisition of Metacloud, Piston’s distributed systems engineering and OpenStack talent will further enhance our capabilities around cloud automation, availability, and scale. The acquisition of Piston will complement our Intercloud strategy by bringing additional operational experience on the underlying infrastructure that powers Cisco OpenStack Private Cloud,” said Hilton Romanski, corporate development lead at Cisco.

“Additionally, Piston’s deep knowledge of distributed systems and automated deployment will help further enhance our delivery capabilities for customers and partners,” he added.

The move will also give Cisco some strong in-house OpenStack expertise. One of Piston’s co-founders, Chris MacGown, was among the originating members of OpenStack’s Nova-core (compute) development team.

This is the second big OpenStack-focused acquisition Cisco has made in recent months. In September last year Cisco acquired Metacloud, a provider of commercially supported OpenStack. Metacloud also had IP in the networking technology it has integrated into its OpenStack distribution, which gave Cisco’s OpenStack play an SDN boost.

IBM, meanwhile has acquired managed private cloud provider Blue Box, which the company said would help bolster its hybrid cloud and OpenStack strategy.

The company said the move would enable it to provide a public cloud-like experience within its customers’ datacentres by allowing it to offer a remotely managed OpenStack offering, which it hadn’t previously.

“IBM is dedicated to helping our clients migrate to the cloud in an open, secure, data rich environment that meet their current and future business needs,” said IBM general manager of cloud services Jim Comfort. “The acquisition of Blue Box accelerates IBM’s open cloud strategy making it easier for our clients to move to data and applications across clouds and adopt hybrid cloud environments.”

IBM said it will continue to support Blue Box customers and use the company as a channel to sell its own cloud services.

Both acquisitions are a sign the old-hat vendors are putting their money where their mouths are when it comes to OpenStack – particularly when some of them, like HP and Red Hat, are digging their heels in and aggressively pushing their OpenStack wares.