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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."
Part of the job of any CEO is to publicly promote the company and make bold statements not just in support of the company and its products but also against the competition and their products. He's just doing his job.
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.
You just redlined my Marketing Weenie Detector.
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.
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...
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?
Going virtual makes everything easier not harder. You have to be a very small shop before the costs out weigh the gains. The first time you really have to worry about uptime, backups ( that you actually test ), unanticipated needs of disparate project teams, or disaster recovery; you will find your private cloud makes it all virtually push button. If that sounds like marketing babble suit yourself, but I have seen multiple shops transform form the mix of single servers and standalone vm hosts to more integrated farm solutions from VMware, Citrix, and open source; and none of them regretted it.
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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.