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VMware CEO: OpenStack Is Not For the Enterprise
coondoggie writes "VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger says he doesn't expect open source cloud project OpenStack to catch on significantly in the enterprise market, instead he says it's more of a platform for service providers to build public clouds. It's a notion that others in the market have expressed in the past, but also one that OpenStack backers have tried hard to shake."
Big corporate CEO says open source projects are only for geeks, children and people who can't afford it. News at 11.
I'm pretty sure that CEOs have been feed this so much by their marketing executives whose paychecks are on the line that they truly believe it. It just makes it so much more fun when they file bankruptcy or get bought out and the new company cans them without their golden parachutes.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
CEO says: "You should pay for my product, instead of using that free shit". Film at 11.
I work for a cloud storage provider and have vSphere and OpenStack clusters and there two are for different tasks. The 'fighting' over the two is comparing apples to banana peels.
He may be right that it's only public cloud adoption *now*, but we (enterprises) are looking at the following as our 3 years road map:
The big problem we have right now is that it's hard, if not impossible, for us to take our big, giant, poorly design monolithic application into the public cloud. We need to implement the cloud methodologies and characteristics internally (elastic, scalable, on-demand etc) before we migrate that compute to a pay per cycle model.
In three years time when we've done the above - I can only imagine how much more stable and mature OpenStack will be.
He may be right, right now.
That's because people have historically coded their apps with the assumption that the database/hard drive/web server/IP address would always be there to write to or read from. They're also written with vertical scalability, i.e., if things are slow then throw faster hardware/more IOPS at it. All of these criteria vmware is good at handling.
People are now writing simple apps that use ridiculously complicated frameworks to ensure things work even when they're pear shaped. Most of those apps are written so scalability is horizontal. More speed comes from throwing more hardware at it. This also increases reliability.
These are usually done by new startups because they have specific needs (avoiding paying a SAN vendor) and skillsets (coders who don't understand, or don't know about the availability of a hardware solution so they code something in software.) The thing is, yesterdays startup is tomorrows enterprise. They won't migrate away from whatever cloud stack platform they're running without serious thoughts to the problems it may cause.
I'd guess one of the reasons a vmware CEO would say openstack isn't a competitor is they're owned by EMC, a SAN vendor.
Having said that, we evaluated openstack for our business and didn't like the rough edges in places. We're using a mix of vmware and proxmox right now.
I sense a wordplay on denial here. If a service provider providing public cloud systems isn't an enterprise level deployment of OpenStack, what is?
I know, support, blah, blah, scaling, blah, blah. I still think he is admitting it is enterprise scale, but directly denying it so that sales managers can point IT managers to "not enterprise" and have to buy his product.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
Look at e-mail as an example. Globally and between corporations people have long used free/open standards, protocols and applications, sendmail, smtp, postfix, etc. However a growing number of users are moving from stand alone e-mail clients to web based e-mail platforms such as hotmail, yahoo mail, gmail, and so on, each of which have the option of being accessed through stand alone clients, or through their web interfaces.
When you enter the corporate environment you largely switch to comercial web server and clients. Perhaps most often Exchange and Outlook, respectively.
That said, many compaies are using open source platforms as their interface to the rest of the world. Whether that server is between firewalls in a DMZ, on some external service provider is irrelevant.
Similarly tremendous portions of internal corporate networks are running Microsoft web servers to host content internally, and managing content with Sharepoint. While there are some examples of each on the Internet, most corporate public interfaces and a the vast majority of other available servers are open source / free Apache, and other servers, with open source php, postgres, python, and so on backing it up.
Based on that model, VMWare and Zen instances will be widely used within corporate environments, however I strongly suspect that OpenStack will be largely used on the Internet in general.
The hazard with saying it will only be used by 'hobbiest' and 'geeks' is that when you get down to it, two of the largest entities on the Internet today, namely Google and Facebook, were started by hobbiest and geeks. And both started with free/open source, software, and are largely using that to this day. In other words people experimenting with new ways of making the Internet work for them are going to do so using the resources they can get the most value for their dollar from, and that's far more likely to be OpenStack than it is VMware or commercial instances of Zen.
You never know...
IBM and Rackspace both compete with Cisco in the Enterprise cloud market. Specifically IBM has committed to on-premises OpenStack powered by their PureSystems hardware platform. This is as enterprisy as it can get.
Disclaimer: I work for IBM, but not in the PureSystems/OpenStack part of it
If I google "openstack" the first item is an ad that links to www.vmware.com/Enterprise. That tells me that VMware does think that they are equivalent, why else pay for the advert?
Bitter and twisted, DON'T ever FORGET the TWISTED
The usual FUD reaction when they see an open source technology compete with their core business. Free Hypervisors made them lose money on just providing those. Now they need to get the money from the enterprise management system tools they made. Unfortunately, open source tools try and manage them all, while their business is based on managing mostly their own hypervisor offerings and not the open source ones, or the ones from their competitors.
RedHat is in on OpenStack and they're putting big bucks behind it. Give it a few years, and VMWare will be the one that has to catch up on Enterprise readyness. Just managing a single group of KVM or XEN hypervisors is already working just fine if you use RHEV (the paid and supported version of oVirt) and I have no doubt that managing clouds will be on par shortly now that big money and many developers are being deployed.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
VMware is digging it's own grave. Pricing changes, licensing and EULA changes, and stupid statements like this are why I don't do business with them anymore.
We already have a large VMware installation - and due to the way our business works (customers work with us and the servers we provide for them for years instead of months or weeks, almost no "peak load" stuff that requires dynamic provisioning...), I feel we don't really need a scale-out platform (which OpenStack seems to be) but rather a virtualization-platform.
If we were to implement OpenStack, we'd have to build in parallel:
Add on top of that the fact that it usually requires a lot of time and effort to get anything built "right" (and seldom on the 1st attempt), I doubt we'd make a lot of savings over VMware even in the medium term.
Even more concerning in my view is the fact that most of the corporate "backers" of OpenStack sell public "Cloud-Services" themselves - we have already learned the hard way (via a different "cloud" product) that when for these companies the need to choose between customers of such a public service and those with a "private cloud" installation arises, they will most likely tend to favor their public cloud customers (or whichever business is bigger).
Coupled with that comes my prediction that OpenStack will "fragment" rather sooner rather than later, with each of its backers offering some sort of "enhanced" ("enterprise") version (with stability patches and some additional features) that may or may not be a bit cheaper overall than VMware (all things taken into account), leaving you with a solution that works "almost like VMware, for almost the same price".
Am I too pessimistic?
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Xen (which the ISV be loving!)
That's his point. Xen (or the commercial XenServer for that matter) has had very very little enterprise penetration. Even when it is used in the enterprise, it's usually not the primary hypervisor but isolated to a specific application within the company. VMWare currently owns that space and the only short term threat to them is Microsoft and Hyper-V. Service providers, however, love it because their primary concerns usually revolve around costs (thus why you see commodity hardware in a lot of cloud provider data centers vs Cisco/HP/IBM/Dell in the enterprise space).
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.”
No, the cloud, in the end, will eat most corporate IT. 20-30 years down the road most companies won't have internal IT anymore. Like everything else these days, corporate cost cutting will eventually win out. Sucks but I can't see it playing out any other way.
BR Most of the current instability can be attributed to industry growing pains. They will work the kinks out and the weaker companies (by ability,not necessarily size) will fall away.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
So regarding Openstack we already moved away the "first they ignore you" phase and going somewhere into "then they laugh at you, then they fight you", uh?
Interesting.
I agree for the small environment. A 50 man company will not need 1-2 IT people.
For the Enterprise, I doubt it. If you have more than 1,000 users you still have enough on-site hardware and networking to worry about, that you'll still need IT. Even if it's just for making purchasing decisions, pushing buttons for off site support, information governance, project management and resolving issues when multi-cloud services are in play, it's the latter that becomes the problem.
If you have multiple tenants for the same cloud services in one company behind one IP address, things start getting really interesting really fast. As when you and a partner company use different cloud services and you start having difficulties. Trust me.. Microsoft / Google etc. can't just stick Wireshark on their data centre to work out exactly what's happening. All current troubleshoot tends to rely on a non-cloud partner having these skills to give them the detail that they can't afford to investigate.
I'm not a nimby, I've helped and encouraged the use of a number of cloud services in my enterprise, particularly for easily solved problems or where it's so specialised or small that it's really not worth anyones time learning how to do it in house. I'm sure there will be a move to outsource a load of services to cloud providers.. It'll be when people try to switch for the first time that the difficulties arise. So I expect "Cloud Reconsidered" in 3-5 years. Probably also if there is another major 2E2 debacle or security breach or outage.
I cloud be wrong.
Jason.
Hell, I run a esx host at home, even if its just for 3 perm linux servers, and 2-3 dev linux servers for fun, lets you try/test new distros quickly.
Even if its just for the snapshot feature, its worth it, considering fedora is so flaky at updates, its cool to have that 'undo' option with one click.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
The fact VMware is playing OpenStack down and bothering to comment about is shows it's definitely going well on the OpenStack side.
Good news, OpenStack is open, it can be built to fit whatever purpose because anyone can come and play.
Closed source corp says open source stuff is not for serious people...yeah I guess that makes sense for them to say so.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
If you read this part of the article:
Despite the statement, Gelsinger also said that OpenStack is an important strategic
initiative for VMware that it is committed to supporting. VMware will work to ensure its products and services work in cloud environments based on the open source platform. And in that sense, Gelsinger says OpenStack is opening up a whole new opportunity for VMware to penetrate the service provider market, which is he says the company has not focused heavily on in the past. “We’re seeing (OpenStack) as an opportunity to extend our position,” Gelsinger said.
You'll see that, despite the remarks on 'not for the enterprise', he is certainly not laughing at OpenStack. Maybe, just maybe, they may even not fight OpenStack!
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you guarantee you'll lose. MySQL isn't for the enterprise. Linux isn't for the enterprise. Hadoop, SaaS offerings like Salesforce, GDocs, etc. Once you say something isn't for the enterprise you almost guarantee that it will be a > $1B business (or fundamental tech used in a $1B business) in the next couple years.
I hope you're right, but often times it's not the technology, best practice, or even what's best for the company that wins; it's how do we grow so our institutional investors who own most of our stock stay happy with us. In the past year I've had several customers, none of them small, ping me about this. If they are asking us about it, it's on their minds. Like I said though, I think this is all a few decades out. The industry is really just starting to get it's bearings and there are still a number of technological challenges to overcome first.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Ok. Business as usual.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Never underestimate the pride and sense of ownership of OSS. When Technical people embrade OSS in the enterprise frequently the solution is way better than any proprietary product. The reason is that its the technical people that are care and feeding for their baby compared to management buying shelfware. Its way more effect for any organization to have 100% engagement by the staff than it is to buy something and not have engagement.
The good news is Redhat is about the best corporate steward you could have on any OSS project. They don't fragement, they embrace and add features to the base Open source project, take the best of what is present in the Open source project, package it and release it as the enterprise version.
We are a good size user of vmware and Redhat products. Openstack is set to replace vmware in the next year 1/2. The reasons are about driving value that proprietary products can't provide. We are even looking very heavy at the OpenShift product (origin project based) as a cloud deployment piece. It a great product from the initial testing, especially if your application is heavy web traffic typed.
...Ken Olsen says that PCs are just for hobbyists, businesses will stick with Minis and Mainframes.
I hope you're right, but often times it's not the technology, best practice, or even what's best for the company that wins; it's how do we grow so our institutional investors who own most of our stock stay happy with us. In the past year I've had several customers, none of them small, ping me about this. If they are asking us about it, it's on their minds. Like I said though, I think this is all a few decades out. The industry is really just starting to get it's bearings and there are still a number of technological challenges to overcome first.
While I agree there are some interesting (and some quite sexy) problems to be solved technically in the cloud arena, I believe it is shortsighted to assume this is all that has to change. In my opinion, most of the remaining obstacles are structural and/or systematic, and some of them are going to be quite expensive and possibly politically impossible to change.
The biggest non-technical hurdles for the cloud to conquer in the United States, as I see it, are:
1) Regulatory: As in somebody better rein-in the NSA or we can pretty much kiss this golden-goose good-bye. Also, we need to update our laws and property rights so that companies don't simply forfeit all 4th amendment protections because their data is on somebody else's hardware in somebody else's data center. Yes, I realize that should already be the case, but as a practical matter it isn't. We need to reform that or you can forget it.
2) Public Infrastructure: Ours is shite. Korea, a country that 50 years ago had people living in fucking grass huts (and in some rural areas, still does,) has better internet performance than we do. That's both pathetic and a show-stopper for a truly transformative cloud experience. If you move it all "to the cloud!" and then have to spend $10k/month on multiple gigabit Internet pipes and the associated services (think anti-DDoS) to make it work you might not have really saved any money... And you can't skimp on those Anti-DDoS services once everything is in the cloud, because a disruption there basically idles your entire enterprise. Before, a successful DDoS had little hope of disrupting anything but your external network, leaving your worker bees happily buzzing around. But once their buzzing can be brought to a halt by a DDoS? That's a catastrophic failure, not just an inconvenience.
3) Hedge fund assholes: These vultures will be looking to scoop up as many cloud operations and data centers as they can over the next few years in the hopes of cornering the non-Amazon market. It's how these people work, and when they do control a significant portion of the market you can look for the value proposition of the cloud to be mostly erased, with the new price increases flowing directly into their own pockets. This actually might also fall under "Regulatory" because really we need to start thinking today, right now, about how to keep these clouds from becoming "too big to fail." Because the other side of it is, once that happens we have another whole caste of businesses that will indefinitely suckle at the government teat, and that will never show a profit on paper for the rest of all eternity to keep that largesse flowing.
Who did what now?
He's right. OpenStack is far from production, not to speak enterprise. I do not expect it get stable and mature with a year or two. Check out OpenStack mailing lists and bug reports. You can't expect reliability from the six months release cycle software when each new release breaks a significant parts of the previous one. Of course you can use it at your own risk. But it require too many efforts to maintain it. It may be cheaper to use some commercial product, depending on your tasks.
If /dev/null is faster than OpenStack I will use it.
Considering that VMWare is/was on the board of OpenStack I'd say they are internally realizing how much money they could make by building a proprietary alternative (probably just middleware management tools built on top of open source). This is a move to promote their own tools and services in what is going to be a competitive field. This is similar to someone saying that no serious business uses open source software. Of course those business always sell closed source software that are saying it.
I would state that things will balance out.
The cloud is useful for some tasks, however there are a lot of security hurdles and perceptions. There is also the fact that WAN links are expensive, and moving everything to the cloud means that the edge links have to be very beefy, as opposed to keeping it in-house where the core LAN fabric is a lot cheaper to deal with.
The cloud is nice, but there are a lot of business regulations (and probably more to come if there are any serious breaches that make the news) to watch out for. In some cases, it is cheaper to just keep the data in house.
But things may change. In 20-30 years, there may be a breakthrough allowing for spread spectrum wireless with extremely high bandwidth or something happens like with hard disks and we go from gigabyte drives to terabyte drives in a few years due to some major technology advances.
If this does happen, and edge/WAN bandwidth does become dirt cheap, that would make life interesting, mainly because there could be a large number of cloud providers, and one could just use software that writes data among multiples to ensure it is stored safely.
No VMware is on the board because of the three Es Embrace, Extend, Eradicate.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
"Also, we need to update our laws and property rights so that companies don't simply forfeit all 4th amendment protections because their data is on somebody else's hardware in somebody else's data center. Yes, I realize that should already be the case, but as a practical matter it isn't. We need to reform that or you can forget it."
When we the public get that level of privacy then we will talk about companies, not before. And yes, for the public this should already be the case and also for companies as well.
Korea is a dinky little country that was nearly destroyed 50 years ago. It's easy to build up from nothing with help from a big partner. The US has hundreds of years of outdated infrastructure over a large area to deal with on its own so updating is going to be expensive and time consuming. This leaves out the basic issue with cloud services that they are only useful in town near the servers and high density infrastructure by design. Everywhere else the cloud is just too unreliable. When it's down, you're down, for as long as they find it necessary.
The story is simple, Cloud is a buzz word. I know IT Managers that aren't technical enough to make the right decision and a buzz word can save their jobs, maybe get them a bigger bonus so they'll push the current buzz as much as they can. Cloud existed before Cloud was popular. It was in the form of web and email servers. Why host your own when someone has more expertise than you to do it.
Sega claims SNES underpowered for core gamers.
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
I worked for such a client.
On paper it appears you saved all this money for the beancounters so they can get there raises for being soo smart!
Problem was desktop support was forbidden to do anything besides support desktops and it is a 2 week response time!! Your sap is not working ... sorry we can't support that go call Fred in Illinios as this shadow IT group takes care of that.
Lisa is one smart cookie who hates I.T! She figured out if she can use a cloud for the new accounting system she wont have to wait 2 weeks for a response. Guess what. The business process requires Johnny to check something and the bank to respond. Johnny goes on vacation and now Lisa is helpless and IT can not help he as Johnny clears and is the auditor for Lisa who use their own invented system. Lisa leaves 6 months later and Johnny is in another state and a new guy who comes in and is lost and takes a month to learn this weird process they do which no one else in the company knows about.
That financial report is now lost and the SEC fines the company etc.
You have business process engineering doing its own thing, Finance doing its own thing, and other departments who now can't integrate and work together as SAP had modules for these functions but each department thought they could save money and work around I.T. with their own clouds.
You lose money in the long term.
When this 1400 employee count had 6 I.T. guys instead of 2 shit would get done and none of this nonsense existed. Reports were never late. Response time was in 30 minutes, not 2 weeks, a new employee would get a new computer and his software installed before he started, not wait a month before things are configured etc. How money are you really saving?
Yes clouds do make sense, but using them like H1B1 or outsourcing to save costs is the wrong reason. They are there to promote efficient to work with your existing system not replace what you have.
http://saveie6.com/
The US has hundreds of years of outdated infrastructure over a large area to deal with on its own so updating is going to be expensive and time consuming.
Time consuming? Sure. That's why we should start immediately. Expensive? No. The cost is trivial on the scale of the federal budget these days.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
VMware knows it's basic hypervisor technology isn't a big deal these days, with plenty of free alternatives. They're trying to focus higher up the stack. If they ever actually make a great enterprise management product, I don't think they'll have a problem with managing open source lower layers as well, and open source tends to not be great at that sort of thing (e.g., these are the tools Amazon keeps to themselves). But VMware has to actually write that great enterprise management product if they want to survive long term, and they haven't shown they can do any such thing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
By which you mean the RackSpace and NASA projects they originated from, right?
AWS API compatibility is something that OpenStack has been wrestling with, but not because they "originated" at Amazon.
Yeah, because everybody knows that 10 servers purchased over the span of 2 years and configured by an endless procession of half-ass IT guys is much more reliable an infrastructure than automated provisioning of 10 identical servers in the span of 2 hours.
To answer your question, "Do I really want to run...", the answer is only "No" if my application architecture REQUIRES that a single high-powered node is the only copy of the instance. Otherwise - VMs are much easier to deploy, their configuration is software-defined, and so easily audited & automated, and their creation is much faster than ordering a hunk of iron from Dell and waiting for it to arrive. If my application architecture can scale horizontally, then I win much more moving to VMs than I lose by the fact that any one of my cheap, easily & quickly deployed, identically configured systems might be slightly more likely to crash on me.
Except for the ones you never even think about and likely use every day. Like most of Google's services. Like the host of "Neue-Web" sites whose backends make use of AWS, S3, etc, and you never even realized it because you figured everybody was still stuck in the good old days of traditional LAMP and WIMP stacks, eh?
The fact that you don't even know where Open Stack comes from is a major tell, friend.
But I don't think Open Stack supports anything equivalent to High Availability, where a VM will automatically reboot on a different host if it's current host goes down. If they could do that, I'd highly recommend everyone sell their VMware stock.
These two features are the heart and soul of the value in VMware's ESX product. If and when Open Stack can do both of those things, you'll have 90% of what you really need in a VM environment.
but I'm certainly hobbier than most of my friends.
--
When we the public get that level of privacy then we will talk about companies, not before.
Your point is reasonable but irrelevant: This is a discussion of the cloud, not of individual liberties. I totally agree: Your 4th amendment protections shouldn't end once you save your data in the cloud. But it's a separate issue--the question was to the viability of the cloud, and that means business records have to be "safe" from seizure when they're stored in the cloud, otherwise the cloud is doomed. Sorry if I didn't genuflect hard-enough in the direction of the individual, but individuals cloud data is worth somewhere between "jack-shit" and "nothing." Business data, on the other hand, could be auctioned off for millions or even hundreds of millions by an unscrupulous NSA operative.
The US has hundreds of years of outdated infrastructure over a large area to deal with on its own so updating is going to be expensive and time consuming.
...And the reason we have 150 years of outdated infrastructure is that the argument that it "costs too much" to upgrade, replace or repair has won the day for much of the last 50 years.
"It's too expensive!" howls the conservative when asked to replace an aging bridge. And then when that bridge collapses and dumps a dozen tax payers and their vehicles in the river, the conservative howls "Government incompetence stikes again!"
Who did what now?
You cannot survive/succeed in a corporate world unless you're a sociopath.
Casteism