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Increasingly, Clouds Are Built the Open Source Way

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Today's cloud computing landscape has no clear leading vendor; but rather is a mosaic of services. While the commercial opportunities are enormous, open source clouds are beginning to dominate the private cloud side of the market.

These are the findings of a new survey of 651 companies, conducted by RightScale, Inc. Among the 64% of respondents who plan to include a private cloud option as part of their cloud portfolio, open source private cloud solutions are taking the lead.  The largest share of cloud adopters, 41%, plan to use only open source-based private cloud options (CloudStack, OpenStack or Eucalyptus), while another 29% plan to use a combination of open source and VMware options. Another 30% of those respondents plan to use VMware-only based private cloud options.

Demonstrating the increasingly diverse mosaic emerging in the cloud space, VMware just announced its own open source project, Serengeti, a platform that supports Apache Hadoop in virtual and cloud environments.

So, many companies seem to be moving to open source cloud solutions for their private clouds. The question is then, will we see a market battle royale between open source cloud providers as well as commercial vendors?  Here's some background on the three:

  • OpenStack, originally created as NASA's Nebula Cloud project and hosted at RackSpace, is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds,  offered under an Apache Software license. (Ironically, it is being reported that NASA has moved away from OpenStack to Amazon as of late.)
  • CloudStack is an open source cloud compute platform used to deliver Infrastructure-as-a-Service, initiated and supported by Citrix Systems, and is also now offered under an Apache Software license.
  • Eucalyptus is an open-source cloud product that began as a research project in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara[/entity], intended to  support the Virtual Grid Application Development Software Project (VGrADS) funded by the National Science Foundation. The solution is compatible with Amazon Web Services[/entity]

There's plenty of buzz that speculate open source private cloud offerings may become the defacto dominant platforms for private cloud efforts going forward. One commentator, InfoWorld's Oliver Rist, even suggests that OpenStack has become the "new Linux," paralleling the open-source operating system's surge in popularity across the tech community. "As with the early days of Linux, the buzz around OpenStack has risen to a roar, with thousands of community members flocking to conferences from Paris to Seoul," he observed. "The level of interest and growth is phenomenal. People with money are excited about OpenStack, too. Investors like True Ventures and big-name corporations like AT&T, Dell, Cisco, and HP, and IBM are jumping in the game."

The question is, are open source clouds ready for the demands of the enterprise, in terms of scalability and availability? These open source private clouds are far from the only solutions companies are pursuing. There are all those public cloud offerings as well. The survey finds more than two-thirds (68%) report that they are pursuing a "multi-cloud strategy."  This most likely includes a hybrid strategy that includes a combination of public and private clouds (53%), while another 15% have a multi-cloud strategy that includes multiple public clouds, but no private clouds. Overall, 89% report that public cloud will be included in their multi-cloud portfolio.

Both private and public clouds are given equal treatment -- 55% prioritize their public and private cloud efforts equally, 23% give more weight to their private cloud initiatives, and 22% prioritize public cloud initiatives. Along with the multi-cloud approach discussed above, this strengthens the view that it doesn't matter where a service comes from, whether inside the firewall from the corporate data center, or hosted outside somewhere.

Managers looking to plan business processes or add new functionality now have much more choice among the many services coming online.  With open source clouds, resident IT managers can unshackle their operations from expensive legacy systems, and more cost-effectively build highly standardized sets of services that can compete with comparable -- and likely more generic -- public cloud services.  This makes IT departments more competitive in the age of cloud, and as a result, everyone has more choice. Ultimately, choice is what it's all about.