IBM Forges More OpenStack Ties with Canonical and Red Hat

IBM has a slew of news announcements this week. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, is spreading out with its OpenStack eforts. It has announced that Ubuntu OpenStack is now available for IBM customers who want to manage their own OpenStack cloud across IBM platforms such as IBM z Systems, IBM LinuxONE and IBM Power Systems, including IBM’s newly announced OpenPOWER LC servers. This is an expansion of the companies’ hybrid cloud partnership, and many instances of OpenStack already run on top of Ubuntu. We covered the news in depth here.

Meanwhile, the company launched many new products that consist of a combination of Power, z Systems, and storage, with cloud-ready functionality already bundled.

There is a new class of Power Systems called the C class — C for cloud. They’re flexible, powerful and have pre-loaded OpenStack-based cloud management tools with built-in capacity and ready to launch features. IBM reports that it is following in the footsteps of companies such as Deutsche Telekom, Tele2, Bloomberg and Time Warner Cable in making Ubuntu OpenStack available to customers as a tested and supported cloud solution.

IBM is also making a shrewd move in tying its cloud strategy to Ubuntu and Canonical's OpenStack strategy.

Canonical runs the world’s largest OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL).Based in Boston, this Lab validates hardware and software OpenStack interoperability for over 35 major vendors, including IBM. In order to achieve this the Lab stands up over 3,500 new OpenStack clouds every month

As we've reported before, Ubuntu OpenStack is the most widely used private cloud platform among enterprises and service providers with over 55% of production OpenStack clouds, more than all other vendor solutions combined. There are over 2 million UbuntuLinux instances launched in the cloud since 2015, Canonical reports.

IBM and Canonical say that they will continue to supply innovation around OpenStack, including “How to Guides” for deploying Ubuntu OpenStack on all IBM platforms. Customer support for Ubuntu and Ubuntu OpenStack can be purchased through IBM or with Canonical directly.  

IBM has also launched new offerings in the cloud monitoring space, which you can read about here.

IBM and its Power Systems are also, of course, cozying up to Red Hat. Through joint engineering and deeper product collaboration, the two companies plan to deliver solutions built on key components of Red Hat's portfolio of open source products, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Virtualization, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability offerings. IBM wants its Power Systems to be a featured component of Red Hat's hybrid cloud strategy.

"Clients choose open source capabilities to achieve new levels of agility and flexibility in their hybrid cloud environments, but they need access to optimal support," said Scott Crowder, CTO, IBM Systems. "Clients have long turned to Red Hat and IBM to support their enterprise computing needs. Now, we are expanding that relationship with Red Hat to provide new systems designed for enterprise-grade open source solutions that go far beyond what commodity infrastructure has offered."

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