Oracle Puts Its Weight Behind OpenStack Project

Proprietary software giant Oracle has become one of the largest corporations to sponsor the OpenStack project. The open source initiative, which is building a completely free set of tools for public and private cloud management, is already backed by the likes of HP, Rackspace, Canonical and IBM.

Oracle has also announced plans to integrate OpenStack components into a range of hardware and software products including Solaris, Oracle Linux and Oracle VM.

ZS3, Axiom and StorageTek appliances are also due to receive an OpenStack makeover. In the future, the company wants to achieve OpenStack compatibility with its Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle Compute Cloud Service and Oracle Storage Cloud Service.

Oracle already announced OpenStack integration for the Oracle Cloud in September.

“Our goal is to give customers greater choice and flexibility in how they use Oracle products and services in public and private clouds.” said Edward Screven, chief corporate architect at Oracle.

Oracle against vendor lock-in?

OpenStack is an industry collaboration that aims to develop a common, easy-to-use cloud management platform. Since being founded in 2010, the project has been rapidly growing in popularity, attracting support from the majority of the big tech vendors, from AMD to ZTE.

In the near future, Oracle customers will be able to use OpenStack software to manage their Oracle cloud products.

For example, Oracle VM environments will now be able to integrate with OpenStack management tools and the Compute Cloud Service will be compatible with the OpenStack Nova fabric controller, which was originally developed at NASA – one of the founders of the project.

Meanwhile, the addition of OpenStack components to the latest version of Oracle’s Solaris should increase the appeal of the “first cloud OS” and result in more installations.

“We understand our customers need to have common management interfaces, rather than being locked into proprietary ones,” said Markus Flierl, vice president at Oracle Solaris.

“OpenStack allows them to do that, both for more traditional general-purpose IaaS environments, as well as our Oracle Engineered Systems. OpenStack integration means they can also use the same OpenStack APIs to manage their mission-critical Oracle Solaris and Oracle’s SPARC T5 and M6 systems, as well as their Oracle Linux and Oracle VM environments.”

Later, the company plans to add OpenStack Swift unstructured data storage compatibility to Oracle Cloud Service, and add relevant APIs to its ZFS, StorageTek and Pillar Axiom storage systems.

All of the changes will be developed at Oracle, and then integrated into the upstream OpenStack code.

The company recently acquired the Silicon Valley start-up Nimbula, a company that develops OpenStack-compatible software tools to control private, public and hybrid cloud deployments from a single dashboard.

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