Ubuntu launches OpenStack Interoperability Lab
If you believe Gartner, by 2016, more than half of IT spending will be on the cloud. Canonical, Ubuntu Linux's parent company, wants its share of those billions.
So, on November 5th at the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong, Ubuntu announced the creation of "Ubuntu OpenStack Interoperability Lab" (OIL) with such powerhouse partners as Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Inktank/Ceph, Intel, Juniper and VMware.
OIL will test and validate the interoperability of hardware and software in a purpose-built lab, giving Ubuntu OpenStack users the reassurance and flexibility of having tested and certified choices. Ubuntu is very popular on clouds as a Linux instance. Indeed, on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Ubuntu is the single most popular operating system instance of all.
According to Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical's founder, "The OpenStack ecosystem has grown rapidly giving businesses access to a huge selection of components for their cloud environments. Most will expect that, whatever choices they make or however complex their requirements, the environment should 'just work,' where any and all components are interoperable. That’s why we created the OIL." If your company is interested in joining up with OIL send an e-mail to oil@ubuntu.com.
Shuttleworth continued, "Ubuntu OIL is designed to offer integration and interoperability testing as well as validation to customers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and hardware manufacturers. Ecosystem partners can test their technologies’ interoperability with Ubuntu OpenStack and a range of software and hardware, ensuring they work together seamlessly as well as with existing processes and systems. It means that manufacturers can get to market faster and with less cost, while users can minimize integration efforts required to connect Ubuntu OpenStack with their infrastructure."
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Ubuntu OIL will test all new OpenStack hypervisors, software-defined networking (SDN) stacks, and capabilities for workloads running on different types of public cloud options, as well as conventional OpenStack technologies to ensure that Ubuntu OpenStack offers the broadest set of validated and supported technology options. Specifically, OIL will test and validate for all supported and future releases of Ubuntu, Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) and OpenStack.
As more and more users turn to running Ubuntu on OpenStack, it's exactly this kind of broad, tested support for software and hardware platforms that will reassure enterprise customers that Ubuntu and OpenStack are the right choices for their cloud-based operating systems.
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