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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."
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.
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...
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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