Tuesday, March 26, 2013

OpenStack Vs VMWare - A Quick Thought


Recently, PayPal/eBay announced that they will be replacing VMWare software from some 80,000 servers with OpenStack. This must sound as a shocking news to VMWare. But not for me.

All this sounds like the good old story of Windows Vs Linux battle, where there were routine announcements of some big company replacing Windows with Linux. Even after a decade of Linux Vs Windows battle, both the systems are still going strong and Microsoft's revenue from Windows Server sales has actually increased enormously.

Being a product manager at EMC and knowing the IT infrastructure landscape so closely, I see that the real picture.

In actual world, OpenStack is not really free - one still has to pay tonnes of money to the "Consultants" who will implement & maintain the OpenStack   This is just like RedHat - which makes money from IT services and gives away Linux for free.

OpenStack is free - but it has several moving parts inside, so implementing and maintaining OpenStack is not easy or cheap. There will be costs involved and it carries risks - mainly security and IT infrastructure management risks for the end customers.

VMWare on the other hand offers a solid set of IT infrastructure management products - vSphere, vCloud Director, vCenter etc., and also has the latest cutting edge products - Software Defined Network (SDN), Software Defined Storage(SDS), Software Defined Datacenter products lined up, which will create a secure & seamless cloud scale, flexible IT infrastructure. Which in long run will lower the total cost of ownership.

VMWare along with EMC has a better road map for cloud scale IT infrastructure deployment and active management - to lower the total costs of IT.  VMWare also has the advantage of using EMC's technologies - such as RSA, GreenPlum, VMAX, VPLEX, VBLOCK, VNX etc., which makes managing large scale IT infrastructure easy and secure, and brings in the best technology in Big Data management.

OpenStack has its merits, It is free and for most part - easy to deploy. The main challenge with OpenStack is to maintain it - Both in terms of managing the upgrades/patches to the stack and the overall infrastructure management: Configuration, Availability, Performance, Security.

Companies such as Rackspace, Amazon, Google, Facebook etc - who have deep technical expertise and an army of IT engineers to manage their IT infrastructure, OpenStack can save money even in the long run. But most enterprises, don't have such capabilities and they are better off with an established VMWare solution stack for private cloud which can scale out to a public cloud when needed to create a hybrid cloud. See: VMWare Takes the Cover Off Its Public Cloud

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Good opinion, I agree with you.