Thursday, April 12, 2012

IBM Joins OpenStack Bandwagon

The open-source OpenStack cloud infrastructure stack has gained a number of additional powerful allies, as IBM and Red Hat have both agreed to support the OpenStack Foundation, organizers behind the soon-to-be-created organization announced yesterday (2012.04.11).  The group expects to make more announcements about the foundation's progress next week at the OpenStack Spring Conference, being held in San Francisco.

Both companies have agreed to join the foundation as platinum members, meaning they will contribute US$500,000 per year for the next three years. The companies will also contribute code changes to the software stack as well.

In addition to these two companies, AT&T, Canonical, Hewlett-Packard, Nebula, Rackspace and SUSE are also listed by Openstack foundation as platinum members. A number of other companies have pledged their support as well at a lower level, including Cisco, ClearPath Networks, Cloudscaling, Dell, DreamHost, NetApp, Piston Cloud Computing and Yahoo. This second tier, called the gold level, requires contributions between $50,000 and $200,000 a year, depending on company revenue.

Last year, Rackspace, which has been overseeing the OpenStack development process, announced that it would spin off the OpenStack project as a stand-alone foundation. Since then, the project's managers and contributors have been working out the details of how the foundation would work.

With the legal help of the committed sponsors, the organizers behind the foundation will write a set of bylaws for the organization, which then will be posted for community review. They expect to ratify the final draft by September.

This expansion of the foundation is an important milestone for OpenStack as it evolves from an effort driven by Rackspace and NASA, to a broad-based coalition. Its goal is to provide an open-source cloud platform alternative to Amazon Web Services. Another reason IBM is such an important addition is because of its work in making the Eclipse Foundation a success — largely by ceding control over the open-source Java IDE to an outside body.

As Mark Collier wrote in his OpenStack announcement blog - "at the start of the process, Jonathan Bryce and I spent the first couple of months learning as much as we could about successful open source foundations, like the ASF, Eclipse, and the Linux Foundation, reading foundation meeting minutes into the wee hours of the morning ..."

Looks like their efforts are starting to pay off.


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  • 2012.04.12 - original post

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