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    IBM Leads Effort to Ensure OpenStack Interoperability

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    At the OpenStack Summit conference in Barcelona today, an initiative led by IBM to make good on the original promise of OpenStack interoperability delivered.

    AT&T, Canonical, Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, DreamHost, Fujitsu, Huawei, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Intel, Linaro, Mirantis, OpenStack Innovation Center (OSIC), OVH, Rackspace, Red Hat, Suse and VMware all joined IBM at the conference to demonstrate interoperability across all their various implementations of OpenStack.

    Angel Diaz, vice president of cloud technology and architecture for IBM, says the vendors, using a RefStack test suite made up of REST application programming interfaces (APIs) that IBM led the development work on, responded to an Interop Challenge that IBM made earlier this year. Based on that challenge, all the vendors that make use of the core DefCore code that must be present in every trademarked distribution of OpenStack were invited to participate in the challenge, says Diaz.

    Diaz says the tests were also designed to show that OpenStack can also be used to support a wide variety of workloads, including everything from cloud-native applications based on containers to traditional three-tier enterprise applications.

    “Our goal is to show both configuration and workload level interoperability,” says Diaz.

    After more than 10 years of development work, it appears that OpenStack is finally gaining some traction. A report from 451 Research released this week suggests that OpenStack adoption as a private cloud is on track to exceed usage in the public cloud by 2020. A big part of that transition, notes Diaz, can be attributed to the work cloud service providers have put into hardening OpenStack in a way that makes it more feasible for enterprises to embrace.

    Of course, the degree to which IT organizations finally embrace OpenStack for private clouds remains to be seen. But at least those IT organizations can at least have confidence in the fact that whatever they learn about running OpenStack will be transferrable across multiple implementations.

    Mike Vizard
    Mike Vizard
    Michael Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist, with nearly 30 years of experience writing and editing about enterprise IT issues. He is a contributor to publications including Programmableweb, IT Business Edge, CIOinsight and UBM Tech. He formerly was editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise, where he launched the company’s custom content division, and has also served as editor in chief for CRN and InfoWorld. He also has held editorial positions at PC Week, Computerworld and Digital Review.

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