Architecting OpenStack for enterprise reality

Table of Contents

  1. Summary
  2. Adding cloud to the enterprise IT mix
  3. OpenStack
  4. Building a bridge
  5. SDN: hype or value?
  6. Managing change
  7. Key takeaways
  8. About Paul Miller

1. Summary

Enterprise IT managers are watching the open-source cloud infrastructure project OpenStack with interest, hoping it might offer an easy way to begin exploiting the cloud alongside their existing IT estates. In this report, we briefly introduce each of OpenStack’s core components before exploring the ways OpenStack might realistically add value alongside existing investment in widely deployed on-premise solutions such as those dependent on VMware’s product family.

Today’s enterprise data center is typically already heavily virtualized. Pools of servers are available for use across the organization, in a manner that appears increasingly cloud-like. With VMware still dominating this market for on-premise virtualization, we could argue that customers who have embraced VMware’s model of virtualization have no real need to take the additional steps required to deploy either public or private cloud solutions.

In this report, we explore some of the ways in which VMware virtualization and OpenStack-powered clouds complement each other, and we discuss the efforts of OpenStack Foundation member VMware and other project participants to simplify the process by which existing enterprise IT investments might be enriched with the addition of OpenStack.

Thumbnail image courtesy of agsandrew/Thinkstock.