Oracle Joins OpenStack Foundation, Announces Integration Plans

From patent srikes that the company has fired at Google and other companies, to shutting down many of the open source projects that it acquired with Sun Microsystems, we've watched Oracle do many anti-open things in recent years. However, it may come as a surprise that Oracle has announced that it is now a corporate sponsor of The OpenStack Foundation. The company has said that it plans to integrate parts of the OpenStack  platform into its own products, and that it recognizes that customers want flexibility and lack of lock-in when managing cloud deployments.

Actually, it should be noted that Oracle has been steadily pursuing API integration with OpenStack, as I noted in this post. Now, though, the company has announced that it is planning to integrate OpenStack cloud management components into Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, Oracle VM, Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance, Oracle Infrastructure as a Service, Oracle's ZS3 Series, Axiom storage systems and StorageTek tape systems. That's a big potential boost for OpenStack.

"By integrating OpenStack with Oracle Solaris, we can allow customers to use OpenStack as a common cloud management infrastructure across Oracle SPARC and x86 systems as well as our storage products. With Oracle Solaris 11 we are offering an industry-leading cloud solution with superior performance, scalability, efficiency and security," said Markus Flierl, vice president, Oracle Solaris, in a statement. "We understand our customers need to have common management interfaces, rather than being locked into proprietary ones. OpenStack allows them to do that, both for more traditional general-purpose IaaS environments, as well as our Oracle Engineered Systems. OpenStack integration means they can also use the same OpenStack APIs to manage their mission-critical Oracle Solaris and Oracle's SPARC T5 and M6 systems, as well as their Oracle Linux and Oracle VM environments." 

The announcement may also be something of a coup for The OpenStack Foundation. Mark Collier, chief operating officer of the foundation said that it will  "look forward to innovative contributions from their many domain experts." Oracle does have a lot of those.

There is a separate blog post on the Solaris blog providing more details on how specific Oracle products will be impacted.  The post notes that OpenStack is  "arguably the fastest-growing industry collaboration for developing and fleshing out a common cloud management platform."

Oracle is later than many other big tech companies to join the OpenStack Foundation, but in joining it has opened the doors for its giant product user base to embrace OpenStack. And, as we've noted, OpenStack deployments are expected to proliferate in enterprises next year.