Ten Reasons Why OpenStack Will Rule the Enterprise
It appears that OpenStack and VMware are locked in a battle for control over the management of enterprise IT. Practically speaking, that means IT organizations can expect to be managing instances of both for years to come.
To make that task simpler, Mirantis this week launched Mirantis OpenStack 5.0, which integrates OpenStack and VMware while adding support for the latest Icehouse version of OpenStack.
In addition, Mirantis OpenStack 5.0 adds support for the open source Fuel deployment and management tool for OpenStack and sports a new user interface to make OpenStack more accessible.
Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel says thus far the company has more than 80 customers using its distribution of OpenStack. But Ionel concedes that the vast majority of those customers are using OpenStack alongside another IT management framework.
Despite the presence of those other management stacks, however, Ionel says interest in OpenStack remains high, because as an open source platform, it costs less to deploy than it does a commercial cloud management framework.
The challenge at this point, however, is that IT organizations have been investing in frameworks to manage their data centers for years. At the same time, some still have doubts about the relative maturity of OpenStack and the degree to which vendors are actually committed to the OpenStack idea.
Whatever the issue, Mirantis is making the case that IT organizations will be better off with an independent provider of an OpenStack distribution than they would be relying on vendors that have additional IT infrastructure and application agendas. Whether its argument holds true, though, remains to be seen.
