I understand the need for openstack for providers so that they can compete against the scale of Amazon but I don’t see a compelling reason for me to become an early adopter for Openstack in the enterprise DC.

It all boils down to value. If you’re a relatively small shop, then you’re not going to have enough scale to really see value from having a diversity of infrastructure. If, on the other hand, you’re truly an “enterprise” player, then you may well benefit from having two – or more – hypervisors in your environment.

The important thing to understand about OpenStack is that it doesn’t _replace_ your VMware or Microsoft infrastructure, it _manages_ them. You gain the ability to deploy the hypervisor that meets your SLA at the best possible cost. This means that you could use VMware to provide your “Platinum” or “Gold” level SLA capabilities (where you could significantly benefit from some of the advanced management features they offer), and then use Microsoft, KVM, or Xen for your “Silver” and “Bronze” SLAs. Not that these hypervisors are any less capable than VMware, just that you can typically deploy them for a lower cost than you can VMware.

Even though you could potentially be running multiple hypervisors, you’re not going to incur “significant” additional management overhead because each of these will be managed via the OpenStack (or Eucalyptus / CloudStack / whatever – even DynamicOps if you want to stick with VMware) cloud management layer.

When you step back from the data center, it’s effectively providing a layer of abstraction between your hypervisors and your consumers – in much the same way that the hypervisor abstracts the hardware. You gain the same benefits, just at a higher level in the stack.

Honestly, in many respects, I see IaaS as a better way of doing what IT has been doing for years. Where I really get excited is with PaaS. That’s where you have the potential to radically transform the way that IT delivers value to the business (and isn’t that why IT exists in the first place?). Admittedly, you need to re-architect and re-develop most of your applications to take advantage of the capabilities of PaaS, but isn’t that something that your organization does on an ongoing basis, anyway?

All of my existing virtualization tools are based on one of these two management stacks. When I train my staff for cloud why switch platforms as I migrate services? If I cared about lock in then 70% of my workloads wouldn’t already be on one vendors solutions.

What am I missing? Is my view of the world just too small? Is the enterprise market that wide open?