5 VM Routing Mistakes Made in Private Clouds
By all accounts, building a private cloud using OpenStack is not for the faint of heart. There are a lot of components in various stages of maturity that IT organizations have to deploy, test and validate. Because of that issue, most of the organizations that do deploy OpenStack usually have access to external expertise that eliminates a lot of the headaches associated with deploying a private cloud.
To make that process even simpler, Mirantis, a provider of a curated distribution of OpenStack, today announced an alliance with NTT under which instances of OpenStack managed by Mirantis will be hosted on IT infrastructure provided by NTT as a service.
Boris Renski, chief marketing officer for Mirantis, says given the number of organizations asking Mirantis to manage OpenStack deployments on their behalf, the alliance with NTT represents a way to provide those customers with a standard data center environment that can be globally replicated around the world.
“Customers want us to be able to provide the entire managed cloud experience,” says Renski.
While interest in private clouds is running high, the expertise needed to manage them is often in short supply. As many IT organizations contemplate building and deploying private clouds, one of the questions they need to ask themselves is to what degree they want to actually manage it. Many IT organizations these days are opting to focus their limited IT resources on building and deploying applications. The underlying IT infrastructure those applications run on can be built and managed by a third party.
Of course, plenty of IT organizations prefer to manage everything themselves because it costs less to deploy a private cloud themselves over an extended period of time, they already have the expertise on hand, or compliance issues make relying on a third-party service provider problematic. The next decision they need to make is whether to build that private cloud using open source software or rely on commercial software from VMware or Microsoft. Given the fact that OpenStack doesn’t incur licensing fees, interest in the open source platform remains high. Alternatively, however, an IT organization can host that private cloud on a public cloud service such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).
But for a lot of organizations, IT infrastructure is clearly a means to a more important business end. As such, the management of that complex infrastructure is best left in the hands of folks that make it their business to master it.
