Oracle showers gold on OpenStack, dreams of open-source splashback

Oracle has started sponsoring an open-source cloud tech that it already uses within its commercial offerings, as the company tentatively embraces a market it once reckoned inconsequential.

The company announced on Tuesday that it had become a "Corporate Sponsor" of the OpenStack Foundation, following El Reg reporting in September that the company's new public cloud was partly based on the software.

Oracle also announced plans to use the open source technology widely within the majority of its products.

"Oracle is planning to integrate OpenStack cloud management components into Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, Oracle VM, Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance, Oracle Infrastructure as a Service, Oracle's ZS3 Series, Axiom storage systems and StorageTek tape systems," the company wrote.

It also aims to provide broad data compatibility between many of its storage and virtualization and compute services, and their OpenStack equivalents. The company promises compatibility between Oracle Compute Cloud Service and OpenStack's "Nova" tech, and "integration" between Oracle Solaris Zones and Oracle VM environments, for instance.

"Oracle is pleased to join the OpenStack Foundation and plans to integrate OpenStack capabilities into a broad set of Oracle products and cloud services," said Edward Screven, chief corporate architect at Oracle, in a canned statement. "Our goal is to give customers greater choice and flexibility in how they use Oracle products and services in public and private clouds."

Though the company's press release gives the impression of overwhelming adoption of the tech, Oracle did not respond to multiple specific questions by The Register about the state of some of its integrations. Also, the $25,000 a year its Corporate Sponsorship status costs is inconsequential to the multi-billion dollar database titan.

A search of OpenStack code analysis tool Stackalytics for commits by Oracle yielded zero results, versus 13,339 for Rackspace and 6,935 for HP. If Oracle is using the tech, it's not apparently feeding any code back into the community distribution it draws on. ®