Submitted by Yoram Heller on March 07, 2012
In enterprise computing “vendor lock-in” has become a dirty word and understandably so. No one wants to be caught in a situation where they are stuck paying exorbitant licenses to Oracle for DB2 or purchasing an EMC SAN. The costs of migration to a more open system become prohibitive and the potential for disaster outweighs the cost savings.
As Morphlabs can attest, building an infrastructure cloud is not an easy proposition. And, in this crowded marketplace, there are too many mix-and-match options for a CIO to consider. Which hypervisor? Open source or proprietary software? Configuration management software? What about monitoring? Policy management? And perhaps most importantly, orchestration?
In the face of mounting pressures to decrease time to market and increase agility, savings and utilization, enterprise IT organizations do not have the luxury of years of trial and error to determine the best ways to implement cloud computing solutions. And many enterprises are simply lacking the technical expertise and time to fully investigate the constantly evolving landscape before deploying an effective and extensible system.
The reality for today’s CIO is that you simply cannot wait to implement cloud infrastructure. Not only does waiting impact the agility of your organization and its developers, but also a CIO must ask, what happens when the rest of the industry starts moving forward without you? Infrastructure is but one component of a cloud, and your application vendors will begin expecting and requiring an automated, elastic and scalable infrastructure on which to deploy.
What if you could trust a vendor to choose all of the best-of-breed building blocks to compose a cloud solution? What if that solution would leverage open standards for easy portability of data while passing along the savings of community-driven innovation? Would that give you peace of mind?
So what do today’s CIO do when searching for the elusive private cloud recipe? Some of the largest web companies in the world including Google, Facebook and Amazon have been architecting their infrastructure to address these questions for years. In looking at the IT evolution of these companies, the common thread of success is obvious – open source software and commodity hardware in a hyperscale configuration.
At Morphlabs, we believe Open Source and hyperscale hardware are requirements to any infrastructure deployment not only because it drives down cost, but also because of the developer community associated with it. Leveraging Openstack, like the mCloud DCU and Rack do, allows an organization to reap the benefits of an ever-expanding and dynamic community of over 1500 developers across myriad organizations (including Citrix, IBM, Dell, Cisco, AT&T, etc.).
And it’s ok to start small. There is no reason for a CIO to go and invest $500,000 in name brand hardware from Enterprise vendors. The best place to start is with people (and companies) who understand software AND how to deploy it on hyperscale hardware. Because cloud computing is about more than just infrastructure, it’s about reliable service. We’re redefining the meaning of “vendor lock-in” to reflect the collaborative nature required by cloud computing. You can’t go cloud alone. So, finding the right vendor-partner is your key to success.
Note: You can read more about the impact of hyperscale computing approaches on IT organizations in this recent article by Morphlabs’ CTO Lee Thompson.
Your email address will not be published.