IBM today launched a toolkit for its private cloud customers that gives them access to several open source databases.

The Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) toolkit is built on OpenStack, and it runs on IBM Power servers. It initially supports open source databases including MongoDB, EDB PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Redis, Neo4j, and Apache Cassandra.

The company plans to also support enterprise versions of the open source databases — such as the MongoDB Enterprise Server and the EDB Postgres Platform, said Chuck Bryan, open source data solutions offering manager at IBM.

“The public cloud gets all the buzz, but now we’re effectively giving you that public cloud-type experience in the private cloud,” he said. “The toolkit provides a turnkey solution.”

Targeted customers include enterprises in the telco and communications sector, as well as financial services firms and healthcare companies.

These enterprises want to control who has access to their data, and they want to make sure it’s secure. For these reasons, they don’t want to use public clouds. But they still want the public-cloud benefits like speed, flexibility, and scalability, Bryan said.

“Enterprise clients have rich, new applications that they want to develop around Mongo or Postgre or others,” Bryan said. “But they can’t expose their sensitive data in the public cloud. The statistics show it’s like 80 percent of corporate data is inside private clouds or data center environments. That’s only 20 percent that they are able or willing to provide to Google or Microsoft or other public cloud providers. This provides a solution to the other 80 percent. It’s an unmet need for clients.”

The DBaaS runs on IBM Power servers, which Bryan said are designed specifically for big data and provide 2x or better performance, compared to standard x86 machines. They also have greater density, meaning customers can put fewer servers in their facilities, he said.

Last month IBM opened four new U.S. cloud data centers, and it will open four additional data centers before the end of second quarter.

Big Blue’s DBaaS follows other database services announced by big cloud providers in recent weeks. This includes Google’s Cloud Spanner, available as a service on Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure’s database migration service.