IBM Introduces Blue Box Local, An Onsite OpenStack Private Cloud
As OpenStack continues to gain popularity, IT giants such as IBM have begun selling their own versions of the open source cloud package. Officially called Blue Box Local, IBM has capitalized on its purchase of Blue Box over the past summer by enabling organizations with the ability to roll out OpenStack on premises.
Many organizations have regulatory barriers that prevent them from deploying public cloud services into their environments. With Blue Box Local, organizations can begin getting their feet wet with OpenStack from within their own data center. This allows many businesses to meet their internal compliance thresholds while simultaneously gaining the benefits of the OpenStack cloud.
“If you look at most private-cloud installations, they’re measured in months or years to get up and running,” says IBM Blue Box CTO Jesse Proudman.
“There are sites where typically the customer goes and buys a software distribution from a vendor, and they have to figure out how to train their people in that software distribution. They have to figure out how to operate that environment – what do they do when they get a monitoring alert? We’re trying to take all that out of the mix and put a small portion of the IBM cloud footprint in that customer site.”
The Blue Box Local announcement is no surprise for those who follow IBM. Just recently, IBM announced that organizations could use Blue Mix on site, thus making the Blue Box Local offering a natural next step for IBM.
IBM believes that Healthcare IT and financial organizations will gain the most out of the Blue Box Local offering. The idea for IBM is to centralize many of its offerings so that they can served up on-premises or in a public cloud provider such as SoftLayer.
By giving organizations the flexibility to deploy their workloads in the data center of their choice, IBM extends its cloud ecosystem by becoming a one-stop shop for OpenStack, Blue Mix and other popular IBM cloud offerings.
