Rohan Pearce| Techworld
IBM has thrown its weight behind open cloud standards, announcing that all future cloud services and software would be based on “open cloud architecture”. As a first step the company today unveiled a new private cloud tool, SmartCloud Orchestrator, based on the open source OpenStack project.
“History has shown that open source and standards are hugely beneficial to end customers and are a major catalyst for innovation,” IBM senior vice-president of software, Robert LeBlanc, said in a statement.
“Just as standards and open source revolutionized the Web and Linux, they will also have a tremendous impact on cloud computing. IBM has been at the forefront of championing standards and open source for years and we are doing it again for cloud computing.
“The winner here will be customers, who will not find themselves locked into any one vendor — but be free to choose the best platform based on the best set of capabilities that meet that needs.”
IBM joined the OpenStack Foundation as a top-tier Platinum member in April last year.
OpenStack is a collection of open source software for building public and private clouds. It can be used either by providers who want to deliver infrastructure as a service to customers or enterprises that want a private cloud for on-demand, self-service provisioning of compute services for departments.
The roots of the project, which launched mid-2010, lie in collaboration between NASA and Rackspace.
