It’s an unusual month which sees me travel to conferences twice but October was that month but there is a part of me who wishes that I was on the road again and off to the OpenStack Summit in Paris. At the moment, it seems that OpenStack has the real momentum and it would have been interesting to compare and contrast it with VMworld.
There does seem to be a huge overlap in the vendors attending and even the people but it feels like it is the more vibrant community at the moment. And as the OpenStack services continue to extend and expand; it seems that it is a community that is only going to grow and embrace all aspects of infrastructure.
But I have a worry in that some people are looking at OpenStack as a cheaper alternative to VMware; it’s not and it’s a long way off that and hopefully it’ll never be that…OpenStack needs to be looked as a different way of deploying infrastructure and applications, not to virtualise your legacy applications. I am sure that we will at some point get case-studies where someone has virtualised their Exchange infrastructure on it but for every success in virtualising legacy, there are going to be countless failures.
If you want an alternative to VMware for your legacy; Hyper-V is probably it and it may be cheaper in the short-term. Hyper-V is still woefully ignored by many; lacking in cool and credibility but it is certainly worth looking at as an alternative; Microsoft have done a good job and you might want to whisper this but I hear good things from people I trust about Azure.
Still, OpenStack has that Linux-type vibe and with every Tom, Dick and Harriet offering their own distribution; it feels very familiar…I wonder which distribution is going to be Redhat and which is going to be Yggdrasil.