Tomorrow, July 13th sees the first OpenStack EMEA Day devoted to the open-source cloud computing platform. This event sold out very quickly and then was moved to a larger venue and then proceeded to sell out again; looking at the list of the attendees, it seems that the great and good of the UK storage and virtualisation twitteratti with the exception of the VCE gang will be in attendance (actually there are a couple of Cisco attendees but no EMC or VMWare).
A good mix of vendors, service providers and end-users bodes well for this day and shows that there is an appetite to examine alternatives to the nascent incumbents in this space .
I’m looking forward to see what OpenStack can bring to the party; I’ve already looked at the OpenStack storage components and am quietly impressed but I’m looking forward to seeing more about the Compute and the Provisioning components. I think if the latter is strong, then the whole offering has real legs but if it is weak and complex, then it’s a chance going begging.
Provisioning is still one of the areas in Cloud Computing which has some distance to travel…
