Oracle bows to the growing Open Stack trend, promises to integrate its product line with the open-source project.

 

Oracle, one of many world’s leading proprietary software companies, and OpenStack, the open-source cloud software project, are headed for holy matrimony.

Oracle on Tuesday said it’s now a company sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation and may integrate OpenStack into much of its product line.

The speed with which private clouds are invading the datacenter could have been a spur for Oracle to totally embrace OpenStack open-source code, although formerly it has tended to choose up only complementary open-source code projects, consisting of MySQL, Java, and Berkeley DB’s Sleepycat, as they reached full maturity. OpenStack is a still a rapidly evolving set of projects, with varying degrees of ease of implementation. Critics claim sometimes a couple of OpenStack project is solving a similar problem.

Oracle seemed to be guarding its flanks because it acquired Nimbula on March 13. Nimbula had recently shifted from its own proprietary private cloud technique to become an OpenStack-compatible software supplier. But Oracle scarcely trumpeted OpenStack on the time. It put out a two-sentence notice at the acquisition, saying Nimbula produced software for the personal cloud and its Director product “can be integrated with Oracle’s cloud offerings.”

[Wish to learn more about Oracle’s acquisition of Nimbula? See Oracle To purchase OpenStack Fan Nimbula.]

On Sept. 24 at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, Oracle announced Nimbula Director could be integrated into the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, with a cursory reference within the press release to API compatibility with OpenStack.

Since then, OpenStack has continued to grow as a prime open-source project backed by Red Hat, HP, Rackspace, IBM, Cisco, and VMware. With such a lot of enterprise software vendors committing to the project, cloud implementers akin to Comcast, the PayPal unit of eBay, and clothing manufacturer Gap haven’t hesitated to implement OpenStack clouds. At some point soon, Oracle executives decided talking about OpenStack API compatibility through Nimbula wasn’t sufficient for its customers.

In Tuesday’s announcement, Oracle’s references to OpenStack were at center stage and Nimbula was history.

The headline at the company announcement: “Oracle Sponsors OpenStack Foundation; Offers Customers Ability To apply OpenStack To control Oracle Cloud Services and products.”

Other Linux distributions such Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Suse contain extensive integration work to be certain customers can build an OpenStack cloud in the event that they . Oracle’s Tuesday announcement said Oracle Linux will include integrated OpenStack deployment capabilities. Perhaps an equally important constituency is Oracle’s inheritance from Sun Microsystems of Solaris users. It too gets OpenStack deployment integrations, the corporate said.

Oracle Compute Cloud and Oracle Storage Cloud services can be integrated with OpenStack in order that an OpenStack user won’t have to implement new APIs which will employ those services. Likewise, Oracle ZS3 Series network attached storage, Axoim Storage Systems, and StorageTek Tape Systems will all get integrated.

And needless to say the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud hardware for running applications gets its own OpenStack integration besides.

In those enterprises where OpenStack is getting into the datacenter, often as a limited or pilot project, Oracle doesn’t desire to turn out to be being the odd man out. If Oracle products don’t work with OpenStack on day one, it’ll not get the likelihood to rectify that shortcoming on days two or three further down the street.

This move may prove more significant ultimately than the mere acknowledgement of the will for OpenStack compatibility might first suggest. If Oracle recognizes the risks of remaining out of step with OpenStack, then some fraction of its customer base may at some point implement a personal cloud infrastructure on which numerous vendors could be accepted on an equal footing.

Such an atmosphere will be well documented and standardized, and hopefully, to critics, rapidly maturing. The realm of multiple, proprietary systems that after gave Oracle its edge — Digital Equipment’s Vax, Sun’s Solaris, and HP’s HP/UX — could also be in its final retreat, with OpenStack or something akin to it their likely ongoing replacement.

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Charles Babcock is an editor-at-large for InformationWeek, having joined the publication in 2003. He’s the previous editor-in-chief of Digital News, former software editor of Computerworld and previous technology editor of Interactive Week.

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