IBM SoftLayer Now Ubuntu Certified Cloud Partner

IBM’s SoftLayer cloud infrastructure division has partnered with Ubuntu to offer users certified Ubuntu Linux images, giving access to all the latest Ubuntu features, compliance accreditations, and security updates to SoftLayer customers.

Officially, SoftLayer is now an ‘Ubuntu Certified Public Cloud partner’ for Ubuntu guest images, and touting an optimised Ubuntu experience for SoftLayer bare metal and virtual servers.

The Ubuntu cloud guest image updates with enablement, publication, development, and maintenance across all availability zones, and Ubuntu wants SoftLayer users to know that it can offer quality assurance with the fastest security patching of any Linux provider out there.

The announcement rounds off a list of Ubuntu and IBM platform partnership announcements recently.

Broad partnership

“This latest announcement nicely complements our recent work and broad partnership with IBM across platforms such as LinuxOne, Power and Z Systems,” said Alexander Gallagher, Ubuntu’s director of business development.

“Canonical builds, continually maintains, tests, and updates certified Ubuntu images, making the latest versions available through Softlayer within minutes of their official release by Canonical.

“This means that you will always have the latest, more up to date, and most secure version of Certified Ubuntu images.”

One SoftLayer customer, London’s Server Density, said that it looks forward to a more reliable experience when using Ubuntu images on SoftLayer.

Pedro Pessoa, head of operations at Server Density, said: “We moved to Softlayer three years ago, looking for bare metal servers with a great provisioning API and the option of adding virtualization for specific workloads. Now, with official Ubuntu images on Softlayer, we look forward to an even more consistent experience across both machine types, optimised performance, frequent updates, timely security patches, and the option of purchasing enterprise-grade support.”

Canonical released its latest version of Ubuntu in April: Ubuntu Linux 16.04.

The long term support (LTS) release, the first of its kind since April 2014, includes the new Mitaka version of the OpenStack cloud framework, an updated LXD container hypervisor for ultra-fast and ultra-dense cloud computing, as well as ZFS and CephFS for large-scale cloud storage.

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