What IBM’s embrace of Rackspace really means
March 11, 2013
Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Eric Knorr.
When IBM announced last week that all of its cloud offerings would be built around OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system, it was a triumph for the OpenStack Foundation and its large community of supporters. "We dreamed that one day IBM might get involved and do for OpenStack what they’ve done for Linux and other open source communities in the past," Mark Collier, COO of the OpenStack Foundation, told me. "They’re actually committed fully to OpenStack for being the basis for every single cloud solution they have going forward," both private and public.
The announcement signaled that IBM would take the helm as the corporate steward of OpenStack, surpassing in importance even Rackspace — which along with NASA gave birth to OpenStack three years ago. IBM is devoting the necessary money and resources and boasts an impressive track record cultivating open source communities: It built Eclipse from the ground up and was highly instrumental in the success of Linux and Apache…
Unlike Rackspace or Red Hat, IBM will not offer its own packaged version of the OpenStack bits, said Angel Diaz, IBM’s vice president of software standards, open source, and cloud labs. Instead, he told me, "We want this to be like the Apache HTTP Server was for WebSphere. Every modern day application server has Apache HTTP code in it. So that’s what we want [OpenStack] to be for cloud." The first product to bundle OpenStack is IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator, now in beta, which enables customers to compose cloud services using a drag and drop interface…
Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/t/cloud-computing/what-ibms-embrace-of-rackspace-really-means-214238