My name is Colin, and I support OpenStack

Since April of this year (2012) I have been living a secret life. During the day I have been living my normal life, running the Data Center practice at a national VAR driving sales and integration of converged infrastructure built on Cisco, VMware, Citrix, EMC and NetApp.

My nights and weekends however have been spent doing something completely different. It started with casual reading and exploration. Brand new VM’s running odd little hypervisors started sprouting up in my labs. Next thing you know I was spending late nights at strange peoples offices hacking away at something that I think represents a major shift in our industry.

My name is Colin, and I am working on OpenStack

Shift happens…

The major shift I am talking about has been called many things, including “cloud computing”. This is possibly the single most ill defined and overused term of all time. What I am talking about is CIO’s voting with their wallets. They are voting to move significant workloads to low cost fractionally consumed Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings that most people call “Cloud”.

Not all “Cloud / IaaS” offerings are the same, but many of them share the following features. They generally utilize open source hypervisors such as Xen or KVM. Many of them utilize Open Source VM and object and storage platforms such as Gluster and Swift. Almost all public clouds are extensive users of systems automation (DevOPS), and expose SOAP or RESTful API’s (most commonly Amazon’s EC2 API). The use of all these items significantly lower the capital and operational expense for operating a cloud environment.

Why are most Public Cloud (IaaS) cheaper then on Premise Clouds (IaaS)?

The one trend that these public IaaS offering share when compared to the IaaS platforms you see commonly deployed on a customer premise today. The most significant trend is that almost exclusively you will find Open Source (free) software used instead of commercial software and hardware packages. In an enterprise customer it is not uncommon to find up to 50% of the cost of a server spent on virtualization software licensing.

Not only do current on premise IaaS solutions carry a high cost for virtualization software, but it is normal for 300% (3x) the price of servers to spent on shared storage. This is normally done to accomplish the goals of Live Migration (or vMotion) as well as supporting a high number of IOPS.

These costs are unnecessarily high, but the Open Source tools necessary to lower them are not accessible by most customers

This is why I am working on OpenStack. The goal of OpenStack is to provide a high quality, Open Source cloud operating system to the world. This will lower the barrier of entry for using these open source technologies, allowing customers to create private clouds that are price competitive with the “Amazons” of the world. I not only believe in that goal, I am both actively organizing teams and contributing code to make this a reality.

Herb Kelleher, Co-Founder Southwest Airlines (one of my favorite companies) made a difference in this world by executing a vision of “Democratizing the skies”. The people contributing to OpenStack are executing on a similar vision – “Democratizing access to the Cloud”. I have been doing this privately up till now, but consider this my public statement.

My name is Colin, and I support OpenStack