IBM has announced a new Database as a Service (DBaaS) toolkit for open source databases. It’s official name is Open Platform for DBaaS on IBM Power Systems. It will support several open source databases including MongoDB, EDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Redis, Neo4j and Apache Cassandra.
Terri Virnig, VP, Power Ecosystem and Strategy at IBM said: “As the need for new applications to be delivered faster than ever increases in a digital world, developers are turning to modern software development models including DevOps, as-a-Service and self-service to increase the volume, velocity and variety of business applications. With Open Platform for DBaaS, IBM is supporting these cloud development models to provide greater control of data, access and security, as well as the choice and flexibility for agile development of innovative new applications.”
What does the Open Platform for DBaaS include?
The press release gives five things that will be part of the platform. They are:
- A self-service portal for end users to deploy their choice of the most popular open source community databases. These include MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Redis, Neo4j and Apache Cassandra in minutes.
- An elastic cloud infrastructure for a highly scalable, automated, economical, and reliable open platform for on-premises, private cloud delivery of DBaaS.
- A disk image builder tool for clients who want to build and deploy their own custom databases to the database image library
- An open source, cloud-oriented operations manager with dashboards and tools to visualize, control, monitor, and analyze the physical and virtual resources
- A turnkey, engineered solution comprised of compute, block and archive storage servers, JBOD disk drawers, OpenStack control plane nodes, and network switches pre-integrated with the open source DBaaS toolkit
Why now?
It’s simple. This week IBM is holding the first OpenPOWER Developer Congress in San Francisco. To that end there are two key points of interest in this release.
The first is that IBM has built this on OpenStack. This means that it is likely to be deployed inside SoftLayer. It is also probable that IBM will offer this to other OpenStack cloud partners in order to get greater uptake.
The second is that we are getting closer to the launch of POWER9. This announcement is likely to be the first of many as IBM prepares the workloads it will be targeting at launch.
Conclusion
Database as a Service solutions are on the rise. IBM is looking to take advantage of that and build momentum as the launch of POWER9 gets closer. The announcement will also appeal to many in the OpenStack community especially those running OpenStack-based private clouds. It will be interesting to see how many of the other OpenStack distributions begin to offer this on their platforms.
