The promise of a hybrid cloud that makes it possible to shift workloads between on- and off-premise environments based on the specific business requirements at hand is certainly compelling, but what it has in allure it lacks in practicality. The ability to provision and move applications across geographically distributed requires meeting a host of difficult conditions, chief of which is interoperability among the different components.

Equinix, Inc. now counts itself among the growing number of vendors that view OpenStack as the hope of delivering that standardization. The co-location giant revealed on Tuesday that it has entered an agreement with Seattle’s Blue Box Group, Inc. to host the latter’s managed cloud offering, which is built from the ground up on the open-source data center operating system. The solution  is pegged as a dedicated alternative to the one-size-fits-all services offered by the likes of Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. that features the heightened reliability and professional support required for enterprise workloads.

The other part of Blue Box’s pitch is a proprietary management suite that packs a range of value-added services, including standard inclusions such as monitoring and metering as well as less common features like built-in customer relationship management, billing and customer care tools. At first, the offering will only be available through Equinix’s Seattle facility, but the company intends to the data center giant’s Zurich location in the foreseeable future.

Users will be able to access Blue Box’s OpenStack platform through the Equinix Cloud Exchange, the same federated interconnection solution that that the company is leveraging to address the other major barrier to hybrid computing: latency. Introduced in May, the service offers co-location customers dedicated links to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft’s rivaling Azure infrastructure-as-a-service platform that aim to elevate the delays inherent to geographically distributed environments.

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