Canonical Deepens Partnership with Microsoft, Advances Metal-as-a-Service

There are a lot of announcements coming out of the Open Compute Project U.S. Summit this week. HP has announced new Cloudline servers that will sell for low prices and eschew the proprietary technology that the company uses in its Proliant servers. They may especially find a home in organizations standardizing on HP's Helion cloud platform.

And, also coming out of the summit, Canonical and Microsoft announced a partnership extension and demonstrated Canonical’s Metal-as-a-Server (MaaS) deployment in an open computing environment. Ubuntu’s MaaS allows users to treat physical servers like virtual machines in the cloud, turning bare metal into an elastic resource. New support means that Windows and Linux (Ubuntu, CentOS, SUSE) operating systems and application software can be one-touch provisioned on OCS hardware. Together, the two companies claim they will create a more scalable, OCP-compliant architecture to make open source deployments easier for enterprises and telecoms providers.

Canonical has also announced the addition of QCT (Quanta Cloud Technology), a global datacenter solution provider, to its Ubuntu Cloud Partner Program. The two companies have been working to offer a line of integrated OpenStack cloud solutions, including SKUs for Proof-of-Concept, Production-Ready HA, and Production HA architecture.

In 2014, Microsoft joined the Open Compute Project, as did many other companies, to encourage collaboration on the designs of the servers it uses in its large data centers. Collaborating companies in the Open Compute Project can reduce costs and increase the range of hardware options available.

Meanwhile, Canonical is also conducting an "OpenStack Roadshow," where Mark Shuttleworth holds court on the company's cloud offerings. According to the company, at the roadshow events you can:

"...See the world’s most popular Openstack implementation in action, gain insights from the world’s largest OpenStack deployments in telco, finance, media and government environments, meet the architects of Canonical’s OpenStack strategy, and exchange views on requirements for enterprise private clouds."

Canonical is still best known for Ubuntu, but the company is rapidly changing its business model, emphasizing OpenStack, and forging ahead with partnerships with Microsoft and many other companies. Change is in the air.