OpenStack Demand Is High as Havana Debut Nears: Report

The open-source OpenStack cloud platform has the support of many of the world’s leading IT vendors, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Intel, AT&T, Cisco and Red Hat, but does it have the support of enterprises?

A new study from IDG Connect, sponsored by Red Hat, shows growth and demand for the OpenStack cloud. The survey found that 51 percent of respondents were already in the process of their second or even third private cloud implementation. The study surveyed 200 U.S.-based IT decision makers.

Chuck Dubuque, senior product marketing manager at Red Hat, explained to eWEEK that the survey was limited to the private cloud market. From Dubuque’s perspective, there were a few surprises in the study.

“Most respondents were using both homegrown and off-the-shelf cloud solutions together in their environments (53 percent), which indicates a lot of experimentation,” Dubuque said. “A fairly high number of respondents (25 percent) are using self-built private cloud solutions.”

In terms of OpenStack technologies, 84 percent of the study’s respondents indicated that OpenStack is a key part of their cloud deployment plans. Sixty percent of respondents are already in early-stage OpenStack deployments.

Challenges

It’s not all smooth sailing on the path to OpenStack adoption, as the study identified a number of different challenges: 32 percent of respondents indicated that IT staff skill sets were a challenge for adopting OpenStack and 23 percent identified budget as being an issue.

OpenStack has only existed for three years, but that wasn’t seen as a challenge in this particular study. Only 8 percent of respondents identified lack of an experienced vendor as being an issue, while just 7 percent cited long-term viability as being a concern.

Red Hat is among the multiple vendors that provide an OpenStack distribution. Red Hat officially launched its Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform (OSP) in July of this year. Dubuque declined to comment on what the adoption has been for OSP so far.

Havana

The OpenStack community is now gearing up for its next major milestone, with the official release of the OpenStack Havana platform on Oct. 17.

Dubuque noted that Havana brings additional maturity to existing OpenStack core services, which include Compute, Object Storage, Block Storage, Image Library, Identity, Dashboard and Network. OpenStack Havana introduces two new core services to help monitor and manage OpenStack and deploy virtual instances, he added.

“Enhancements and deepening functionality in core services should help drive early adopters into test/dev and production deployments, while the new emerging projects such as Deployment and Messaging provide the roadmap for future functionality and direction of the project,” Dubuque said. “The vision that Havana paints for the future is exciting and should further the momentum behind OpenStack.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.