Following its acquisition three months ago, Blue Box has been quickly added to Big Blue’s private cloud-as-a-service offerings.
The flexible offering can use both dedicated hardware on and off premise and will offer a single management tool for all OpenStack private clouds, regardless of location.
As part of the integration, customers will be able to use the OpenStack-powered infrastructure from their preferred data centre location. Being able to isolate data in SoftLayer’s global data centres will help to reduce latency and hopefully improve performance for users.
Todd Moore, VP, Open Technology, IBM told CBR: "The significance with Blue Box is that their model, the model of private cloud as-a-Service is one that allows customers to get going very rapidly. You’re not on your own trying to understand how to stand-up an infrastructure."
Moore went on to say that he believes that this way of offering private cloud could be the way of the future: "This is the model that will excite people and get them going."
However, some he expects will continue to want to do it on their own, due to varying levels of paranoia. "The most paranoid want to be able to touch their data, they want their installation completely on premise and part of them."
Doing that though they give up the ability to have changes handled for them, freeing them up to be doing something more vital or innovative for the business.
Big Blue is additionally ramping up its offering in software-defined storage with the expansion of products in its Spectrum line, Protect and Accelerate. The goal of the enhancements is to allow users to combine in house deployments of it with its cloud storage services.
Protect users will now be able to store data in either the companies cloud or on internal storage devices.
The updates to Accelerate extends its deployments with SoftLayer based cloud, this means that the same infrastructure can be deployed on premise and managed with the same interface as off premise.
