IBM Drives Integration of Open Technologies to Foster Cloud Adoption

IBM's open cloud leadership provides its cloud community with greater resources to accelerate cloud growth

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Jun 10, 2014, 09:30 ET

ARMONK, N.Y., June 10, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that it is accelerating the adoption of open technologies for cloud computing to assist companies to more quickly integrate its existing infrastructure, respond to market changes with greater agility and deliver additional value to its clients.

To provide a more flexible way to build, scale and deploy applications and reduce the time and expense of cloud, IBM is announcing it is working on an open integration model with Docker and the open source Docker project community. While the Docker open source community further advances its position toward open governance, IBM has taken steps to further integrate with Docker.

IBM has taken steps to further integrate with Docker including:

DockerHub will be hosted on SoftLayer to provide companies with greater ease of use and maintenance
IBM and Docker will ensure that customers have access to all relevant content from the Docker data repository (or Hub Registry), including compatible portions of the 14,000 Dockerized applications currently on the DockerHub Registry
IBM will offer a certified Docker image of the cloud optimized WebSphere Liberty Profile Application Server to provide companies with the greater performance and flexibility

Additionally, by combining uniquely IBM end to end optimized SoftLayer bare metal servers, IBM Java, Docker and the IBM WebSphere Liberty Profile; clients will have access to faster startup times, half the memory usage, and dramatically faster I/O when compared to traditional virtualization techniques using other application servers.

"As Docker has become more mainstream, we have seen a number of Fortune 500 users seeking to deploy Docker as part of broader transformational data center initiatives," said Ben Golub, CEO of Docker. "IBM brings a unique set of comprehensive capabilities and scale to deliver solutions to these users, including a world class private cloud offerings via OpenStack, public cloud via SoftLayer, system development lifecycle tools via Rational and BM Global Services."

In addition to the work IBM is involved in with Docker, IBM has also been a key contributor in driving industry support for open technologies for cloud. By working with foundations like OpenStack, Cloud Foundry and others, IBM continues to assist in highlighting the industry benefits of broader adoption of open technologies.

"The IT industry continues to rally behind a cloud built on open and community-driven technologies," said IBM Vice President of Open Technologies and Cloud Performance Angel Diaz. "IBM continues to firmly believe that the best means to truly drive wide-spread adoption and innovation of cloud computing is to ensure open technologies are at its core."

While IBM's commitment to Cloud Foundry was announced less than a year ago, Cloud Foundry has quickly become another opportunity to assist clients to develop and adopt open cloud computing platforms. Taking an active role in Cloud Foundry, IBM continues to increase its contributions to the community. The company also has people directly working in the community and many more working in IBM and is one of the top contributors to the project.

As a founding and platinum sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation, IBM has nearly 400 resources dedicated to OpenStack including development resources that are:

Contributing meaningful improvements in areas such as availability and security. (a top contributor to the last several OpenStack Releases)
Integrating OpenStack in IBM offerings
Working on client engagements
Driving internal and external deployments and marketing activities

Additionally, IBM was instrumental in driving improvements with OpenStack's latest release – Icehouse. Specifically, IBM played an important role in addressing improvements with quality assurance, authentication and security, storage and orchestration that will help generate greater enterprise acceptance of cloud computing.

As part of IBM's commitment to open technologies, IBM continues to incorporate the latest releases of OpenStack foundation releases.

In mid May, IBM announced it is expanding its support of open technologies by providing advanced OpenStack integration and cloud virtualization and management capabilities across IBM's entire server portfolio with IBM Cloud Manager with OpenStack. The solution provides support for Icehouse, and full access to the complete core OpenStack API set to help clients ensure application portability and avoid vendor lock-in. It also extends cloud management support to IBM's full server portfolio.

IBM is also enabling clients to connect the services in an OpenStack cloud to their IT management services like monitoring and backup with IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator. Orchestrator provides a self-service catalog for non-IT users to request services then monitor and bill usage of those services. In addition it assists in automating and controlling cloud deployment and change processes.

Additionally, and as we reach the one-year anniversary of IBM's acquisition of SoftLayer, IBM is assisting companies to build on open technology to ensure interoperability and accelerate success with cloud with the SoftLayer cloud platform. In doing so, clients can rapidly deploy OpenStack environments in near real-time on bare-metal public cloud infrastructure.

As a proponent and supporter of open technologies, SoftLayer Object Storage is based on OpenStack Object Storage. By basing it on OpenStack, it provides a robust and highly scalable object-based storage solution that is ideal for storing static data such as virtual machine images, media, and email archives.

IBM in partnership with Pivotal also made WebSphere Liberty Buildpack natively available on Pivotal Web Services for developers use. The WebSphere Liberty Buildpack enables developers to use WebSphere Liberty Profile on Cloud Foundry. WebSphere Liberty Profile is lightweight and designed for cloud, making it easier for developers to build and deploy Web, mobile, social and analytics enterprise Java applications on the cloud. Developers can also quickly enhance these applications using a broad array of services on IBM Bluemix.

IBM recently announced that businesses of all sizes, are rapidly adopting IBM Bluemix™ to develop software in the cloud with greater speed, security and quality. This is enabling companies to rapidly build, deploy and manage cloud apps based on IBM's open cloud architecture and Cloud Foundry. Bluemix provides developers access to open source and IBM's software for integration, security, transactions and other key functions, as well as software from business partners.

About IBM Cloud Computing
IBM has helped more than 30,000 clients around the world with 40,000 industry experts. Since its acquisition in 2013, SoftLayer has served 4,500 new cloud clients. Today, IBM has 100+ cloud SaaS solutions, thousands of experts with deep industry knowledge helping clients transform and a network of 40 data centers worldwide. Since 2007, IBM has invested more than $7 billion in 17 acquisitions to accelerate its cloud initiatives and build a high value cloud portfolio. IBM holds 1,560 cloud patents focused on driving innovation. In fact, IBM for the 21st consecutive year topped the annual list of US patent leaders. IBM processes more than 5.5M client transactions daily through IBM's public cloud. For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/cloud. Follow us on Twitter at @IBMcloud and on our blog at http://www.thoughtsoncloud.com. Join the conversation #ibmcloud.

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Scott Cook
IBM Media Relations
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SOURCE IBM