What IBM’s embrace of OpenStack really means

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.

[ Is OpenStack the new Linux? | Let us know your company’s IT priorities in this year’s InfoWorld 2013 Navigating IT Survey. | Get the latest insight on the tech news that matters from InfoWorld’s Tech Watch blog. ]

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 of 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.

Working behind the scenes Before talking to Diaz, I had no idea how much influence IBM had already exerted on the development of OpenStack. The company is the No. 3 code contributor to the project and, in particular, added quite a bit to the Folsom release last fall.

According to Diaz, as a starting point for those development efforts, IBM drew on its existing private cloud software, dubbed SmartCloud Foundation, which offered much the same functionality as OpenStack. “In fact, it was architected in a very similar way. What we did was kind of teased out, and we tried to contribute what we thought was really good and would help OpenStack back into OpenStack.”

IBM essentially donated functionality from its SmartCloud Foundation product to the Folsom release of OpenStack — and going forward, all future versions of SmartCloud Foundation will be built around OpenStack. Over and above the core OpenStack bits, Diaz says, SmartCloud Foundation adds management, security, orchestration, and more.

This arrangement may a little sound self-serving, but I doubt IBM is trying to bully the OpenStack community to go in a certain direction. “You don’t get rid of the meritocracy,” Diaz told me. “IBM can’t go in and say, ‘You do what I say.’ That would just stifle innovation.”

Rackspace, for one, applauds the IBM announcement. In an interview last week Scott Sanchez, director of strategy for Rackspace’s private cloud, told me, “I think it’s great. The more traction, the more validation, the more people that are out on the market with OpenStack solutions, the faster it becomes the only choice.”

Making workloads portable But IBM doesn’t intend to stop at HTTP-like standardization of private cloud management. As Diaz made clear, the company is also working toward making workloads portable from cloud to cloud — which is key to avoiding cloud lock-in, perhaps the primary inhibitor to public cloud adoption.

Diaz points to an emerging IBM-backed Oasis standard known as Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA). It’s worth quoting Diaz at length, as he explains TOSCA’s potential benefits for both customers and software vendors:

It’s a way of describing a workload application that’s independent of the actual infrastructure that’s running it. I’ll give you a real example: You can imagine encoding, say, an SAP application or SugarCRM — along with its data store, its application server, whatever — its LDAP, it’s connections, everything. And you can describe what you need to stand one of these things up, how you start it, how you stop it, how you manage the lifecycle, how you do patches, etc. That kind of stuff.

It’s a declarative model. And what that allows you to do is take a workload that’s running, say, in and IBM environment and move it somewhere else — say from a private cloud to a public cloud. What it also allows folks like SAP — and this is why they’re really involved — they want to have their stuff running in everybody’s cloud. But the development costs for them — let’s say that there are six clouds that they care about — they’ve got to figure this out six different times and that’s expensive. So they can reduce that cost a bit by using standards like this.

After years of covering Web services standards wars, I have to take TOSCA with a grain of salt, although Diaz claims the Oasis group is very active and includes the likes of Google, HP, NetApp, Red Hat, and SAP, as well as IBM and perhaps a dozen others. Either way, TOSCA shows the direction IBM is working in — and, says Diaz, it overlaps with a similar OpenStack project known as Heat, a template-based orchestration engine.

The competitive OpenStack landscape Of course, IBM’s plan to make the latest, unvarnished OpenStack bits core to all its cloud offerings is only one approach. Piston Cloud, Rackspace, Red Hat, and others will continue to deliver packaged OpenStack versions — and soon the first OpenStack appliance will arrive from Nebula, whose CEO Chris Kemp was CTO of NASA when the agency began developing the Compute portion of OpenStack.

Moreover, IBM doesn’t have an OpenStack public cloud yet, while HP and Rackspace do. Somehow, it’s difficult to imagine IBM going into the commodity public cloud business. Last time I looked, to use the current IBM public cloud, you need to contact IBM and wait for someone to get back to you. It’s not exactly the self-service model.

But for private cloud engagements, particularly with enterprises rather than service providers, IBM would appear to have an edge. Professional services are the company’s bread and butter. Plus, IBM claims that it had 5,000 private cloud customers as of last year. I have a feeling that claim may rest on a rather loose definition of the private cloud, but no doubt some major portion of those customers may be running SmartCloud software of some kind, which will soon be upgraded to include the OpenStack bits.

Diaz puts it bluntly: “Our objective, frankly, through this layer of cloud technology, this infrastructure-as-a-service layer, is that we want a ubiquitous open source infrastructure as a service layer, period, end of story. That’s what we want. OpenStack was headed in that direction when we helped create the foundation. It’s even more in that direction now.”

This article, “What IBM’s embrace of OpenStack really means,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Eric Knorr’s Modernizing IT blog. And for the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld on Twitter.