Conventional wisdom tells us that organizations implement private clouds for workloads that cannot move to the public cloud. After all, building a private cloud is difficult — according to a Gartner poll, 95 percent of private clouds fail for various reasons. The public cloud, in contrast, offers on-demand provisioning of IT resources and near-infinite scalability for rapid time-to-value.
Recent studies suggest, however, another motivation for private cloud adoption. OpenStack’s April 2016 User Survey Report found that cost savings is by far the top business driver for implementing an OpenStack private cloud. Two-thirds of respondents said their No. 1 reason for choosing OpenStack was to “save money over alternative infrastructure choices.” These results echo OpenStack’s Fall 2016 survey, in which 67 percent of respondents cited cost savings as their No. 1 priority.
Of course, “alternative infrastructure choices” could very well include traditional data center environments as well as the public cloud. Nevertheless, as organizations increase their consumption of public cloud services, many are incurring significant ongoing expenses and looking to get a better handle on their cloud spend.
What Is OpenStack?
OpenStack is an open source cloud platform with a set of software tools that enable users to deploy resources on the fly and manage them centrally. It has matured along with the cloud market to become the solution of choice for both enterprises and service providers. The 13th versions, dubbed “Mitaka,” was released earlier this year with a focus on simplified manageability, greater scalability and an improved user experience.
OpenStack adoption is not without its challenges, however. In a recent Dynamic Markets survey, 78 percent of respondents said they lacked the skills needed to adopt an OpenStack private cloud. In addition, 65 percent of organizations said that OpenStack implementation was difficult, and half of OpenStack projects failed.
The Value of Commercial Distributions
Several of the vendors involved in the OpenStack community, including Red hat, VMware, Oracle, HPE and Cisco, offer OpenStack distributions that integrate with their products. Commercial distributions help to reduce complexity and ease implementation challenges by layering additional features and support on top of the OpenStack code.
Two commercial distributions based upon the “Mitaka” release have been introduced in recent days. VMware Integrated OpenStack 3, announced at VMworld 2016, includes new features that make deploying OpenStack simpler and more cost-effective and allow customers to use existing VMware vSphere workloads in an OpenStack cloud. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9, announced August 31, is a secure, production-ready automated cloud platform integrated with Red Hat Enterprise Linux that offers automated upgrade and update paths for mission-critical operations. Additional commercial distributions of Mitaka are likely on the horizon.
The TCO Equation
Because OpenStack is an open source project, the source code is free to download. If the primary reason for adopting OpenStack is cost savings, wouldn’t it make sense to implement and support the open source code rather than choose a commercial solution?
To answer this question, Red Hat conducted a total cost of ownership (TCO) study of self-supported and commercially supported OpenStack implementations. Self-supported implementations wound up being significantly more expensive over the long haul due to the cost of hiring, training and retaining skilled OpenStack engineers.
If cost savings is your main reason for exploring OpenStack, it makes sense to evaluate the commercial distributions as well as a self-supported implementation. Technologent can help you sort through the options and architect a private cloud environment that meets your business, IT and budget requirements.
Comments