The U.S. government’s “Cloud First” policy, which declares that IT managers in the public sector should look to cloud models whenever possible, has driven a number of land grabs in recent months.
Vendors are looking for ways to appeal to the cost-efficiency angle of federal CIO Kundra’s directive as well as finding ways to assure quality performance and operational efficiency. One of the key phrases that emerges for federal agencies is “open source” and partnerships like one between Dell, Canonical and Autonomic Resource aim to target this focus.
Canonical and Autonomic Resources have announced a strategic partnership to provide federal government customers with Dell Blade servers with Eucalyptus-based Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) already installed. The solution has already been deployed and tested in a number of private cloud projects for enterprise use but is now being pitched to the public sector.
According to Autonomic Resources, this partnership means that cash-strapped agencies looking to move forward with cloud computing goals can do so more cost-effectively and the scale needed. UEC is open sources OS for cloud environments that has pre-configured support for Amazon’s EC2 APIs, which is line with Amazon’s attempt to appeal to federal customers.
The appeal behind this offering, at least from the perspective of Neil Levine, VP of Corporate Services at Canonical, is that “government IT managers are spared from installation headaches because UEC is preinstalled on Dell servers as a turnkey solution.”
Canonical is becoming a louder voice among the constant din in the cloud computing arena with its other Dell-related announcement last week related to the Dell PowerEdge C2100 and C6100 servers as well as their news about getting behind the “other” open source cloud OS, OpenStack, which is the brainchild of Rackspace and NASA. Chances are that Canonical’s next announcement will be along the lines of supporting OpenStack with the release of more cloud-ready servers.