I’m continuing to write over at The Virtualization Practice, and it’s been fun so far. Those of you following what I’ve been doing have probably seen me take a real turn towards converged infrastructures in the last six months, both for TVP and for TechTarget. Not that I don’t think the public cloud is attractive to many, but hardware vendors are doing some real interesting things that are keeping on-site IT fairly attractive. Plus the local telco lobbies and myopic/dirty legislators seem to be keeping inexpensive bandwidth, the Achilles heel of the cloud, to a minimum in most non-urban places. Anyhow, we’ve got:
wherein I’m trying to figure out if Dell’s converged anything worth using (I think so, especially if you need physical deployments or want respectable amounts of RAM on your physical nodes). I largely ignore their vStart lineup, which is all basically the Active System without as much standardization and integrated management, but hey, I don’t have infinite time here, and vStart basically just converges how you buy a bunch of gear. Not that vStart is bad, just not what I consider convergence.
I also wrote about:
a few weeks ago during the OpenStack Summit as they were announcing some new, badass features in Grizzly. The rate OpenStack has been moving forward is very impressive, doing major releases every 4-5 months as they sprint to catch VMware (or pass them, if you need features like distributed tiered storage, software-defined networking, or that new-fangled IPv6 crap so you can be part of the 21st century and also talk to mobile devices, or anybody in Asia… not that I’m bitter). You still need a mad scientist or two on staff to run the thing yourself, but there’s finally enough good stuff in the base product that we’re seeing some real vendor offerings with real enterprise support at price points that are going to start making people think about using OpenStack somewhere other than their lab.
I just wonder when we’re going to start seeing the inevitable fragmentation of OpenStack, including a loss of interoperability. At a certain point all open source projects endure some infighting, or someone will have a good idea they want to keep to themselves, and the open source code means a codebase fork is the functional equivalent of taking one’s ball and going home. I hope I’m wrong, but I’d bet money it’ll happen in the next year. I’ll also bet that it won’t be VMware’s fault, though they’ll somehow end up the scapegoat. I just worry that the currently-bleak third-party tool ecosystem for OpenStack will remain that way if there’s fragmentation.
Anyhow, thanks for reading. Y’all rock.