SoftLayer Adds IBM Cloud OpenStack Services to Simplify Open Source Cloud Migrations
SoftLayer, the IaaS offering of IBM, has launched a new feature that allows organizations rapidly administer and manipulate their OpenStack deployments. With the new update, enterprise customers for IBM can easily move their OpenStack services from an on-site data center into the public cloud (and vice versa) with very little administrative overhead.
The new service is officially called IBM Cloud OpenStack services. IBM mentions that they’ve deployed the new service to help enterprises address the need for redundancy between their public, private and hybrid cloud offerings.
Organizations that use IaaS sometimes employ more than one cloud service to do their bidding. In fact, RightScale mentions that 82% of organizations that use IaaS within their environment typically take a multi-cloud approach. One of the neat things about OpenStack is that the platform is largely vendor neutral, making it easy to move workloads between different providers.
Because of this, OpenStack workloads can be moved between other cloud providers or your onsite data center. Some cloud analysts have suggested that these migrations in the past have traditionally taken days or weeks. IBM’s Cloud OpenStack Services simplifies this migration by allowing administrators to kick this migration process off with just a few clicks.
The new IBM Cloud OpenStack Services feature within SoftLayer can be used to build applications in the cloud and move them into an on-site data center once the application becomes mature enough. Consequently, organizations can also build applications on top of OpenStack in their on-site data center and easily move it to the SoftLayer cloud if they’d rather scale the application up and down while making it available in the public cloud.
Big Blue’s announcement for its IBM Cloud OpenStack services coincides with the OpenStack Summit which kicked off earlier this week in Vancouver. IBM shelled out $2B for SoftLayer in 2013. Since then, IBM’s public cloud platform has continued to mature with features and functionalities being added within the environment on aS weekly basis.
