Microsoft cloud partner adds OpenStack platform support

GreenButton, Microsoft's 2011 Windows Azure ISV Partner of the Year, is lending its support to the OpenStack open-source approach for building public, private, and hybrid cloud environments.

GreenButton's platform, Cloud Fabric, is used by enterprises and software developers that need to deploy vertical applications onto virtualized on-demand infrastructure. The company boasts clients across digital media, engineering, oil and gas, financial services, and biotech industries.

The move will mean that any GreenButton-enabled application or big data workload can be dynamically deployed or seamlessly burst into OpenStack cloud environments, without requiring changes to the application, whenever additional capacity is required.

"We strongly advocate open solutions and offering choice to our customers to ensure their cloud strategy is providing the most value," said Dave Fellows, the CTO of GreenButton, which has its US office in San Francisco, but also has a significant presence in New Zealand. "With the growing popularity of OpenStack, it is an exciting addition to the GreenButton arsenal, which also includes support for Azure, [Amazon Web Services], and vCloud platforms. Running workloads seamlessly across customers' private and public cloud stacks is very compelling, and many of these will include OpenStack."

Here are some specific features GreenButton is touting as a result of the OpenStack support:

• The ability to support big data workloads, such as Hadoop, on private and public clouds

• Enhancements to the GreenButton Mission Control governance toolkit

• Uses Cassandra Project and OpenStack Swift of job metadata.

GreenButton's core customer base includes service providers, software developers, and organizations that are moving their applications to cloud environments. A sample customer is the state of Georgia, which is using GreenButton to make its video and audio archives accessible and searchable on the web.