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IBM Launches OpenStack Services

IBM has added OpenStack services to its IBM Cloud marketplace to support interoperability between on-premise IT systems and off-premise cloud workloads.

OpenStack is a free and open source cloud computing software platform for public and private clouds. With the addition of OpenStack services to the IBM Cloud marketplace, it will be easier for IT teams to deploy an OpenStack cloud on top of IBM Cloud. The service provides access to SoftLayer's self-service global cloud infrastructure, giving organizations the "flexibility, security, power and scale of IBM cloud in an open environment," according to the company.

As educational institutions increasingly shift operations to the cloud, many are choosing open standards, such as OpenStack, which provide them with more flexibility than proprietary standards. According to the company, IBM OpenStack services will give organizations that flexibility, letting them "select from a range of underlying hardware configuration options based on open standards and deploy services from IBM’s SoftLayer global data centers with a managed-services approach based on the needs of the workload."

The company cited a number of benefits of using its OpenStack services, including faster deployments and improved consistency across multiple environments owing to improved interoperability between hosted and on-premise systems, as well as predictable performance, speed and agility.

In related news, IBM introduced object storage as a service on its open cloud development platform, Bluemix. Developers can use Bluemix to create applications and store their objects in SoftLayer's OpenStack Swift-based Object Storage. According to the company, Object Storage is more scalable than traditional file system storage environments, requires less metadata to store and access files, and reduces the overhead of managing file metadata, so organizations can scale out object storage "simply by adding nodes."

Further information about IBM OpenStack services can be found on the IBM Cloud site.

About the Author

Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].

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