Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Kamesh Pemmaraju, vice president of Product Marketing at Mirantis
Mirantis Sees Asia Driving OpenStack Growth in 2016
OpenStack was the hot flavor of clouds for a few years before it entered the “show me” phase of technology adoption. Today, more and more enterprises from Walmart and Wells Fargo to telecommunication giants AT&T and Ericsson are deploying large clouds in production. The hottest emerging vendor in OpenStack is Mirantis. They recently announced a $100 million investment round led by Intel that brings their total outside funding to nearly a quarter billion dollars. So I turned to Kamesh Pemmaraju, Mirantis vice president of product marketing, to talk about OpenStack in 2016.
He had five major predictions to share:
1. OpenStack and Containers Bridge the Gap
This year we saw quite a bit of noise around containers and OpenStack – especially with the release of Google’s Kubernetes – it’s just the beginning. I think in 2016 we are going to see OpenStack act as the single open framework that bridges together VMs, containers and bare metal. OpenStack will be the only architecture that lets businesses use all three. In fact, OpenStack itself will be leveraging containers – all the services like Nova, compute, storage within OpenStack will leverage containers and run as micro-services. Doing it this way simplifies everything — testing and deployment, and management – and gives businesses scale, speed, and reliability.
2. China and Asia’s Mobile Revolution Drives OpenStack Adoption
Adoption rates of OpenStack in China especially, but really across India and APAC, will outpace the rest of the world by a factor of 2x-3x. Just look at the number of mobile phones in the East (China has more phones than India and the U.S. combined). Billions and billions of these phones concentrated across Asia will lead to an explosion of cloud services. Not that there won’t be explosive growth in the US and Europe as well, but that growth will be driven by data that needs to be processed.
3. Carrier Grade – Telcos Begin to Standardize
In 2015 we saw telcos already beginning to embrace OpenStack – but primarily for non-mission critical environments. There were some interesting developments in 2015 on OpenStack and NFV and I think in 2016, we will see carriers starting to embrace OpenStack as a platform for NFV, standardizing across the stack, across the enterprise. So there will be this standardization, building blocks, common services, across the telco landscape. The biggest challenge will be interoperability (there are all these vendors selling VNFs that aren’t compatible with each other), and that problem needs to be solved. A number of labs are popping up (TIA is proposing an interoperability lab; Verizon and AT&T are also building labs) and once it’s squared away — and it will be — OpenStack will be everywhere in telco.
4. DIY OpenStack Distributions May have Crested in Adoption
As with Linux, there will always be DIY and new distributions popping up, but I think in 2016 the tire kicking and testing will be mostly done and businesses will turn to the mainstream distros to get the job done. And frankly, some say that the mainstream distros will actually be cheaper than DIY. Ultimately the DIY customers will see that it’s expensive and hard to find people with the right skills and will stop trying to use open source trunk to build their own stuff for production deployments. Businesses went to Linux distros to do something serious — run mission-critical workloads in production environments — and businesses will be doing that with OpenStack.
5. VMware, Dell and Red Hat
We’ll have to wait to see how Dell acquiring EMC (and VMware) ultimately shakes out, but let’s just say that Dell has been a very close partner for Red Hat for a long time. Now that EMC/VMware are all part of the Dell family, how much love with this new company show Red Hat? OpenStack competes directly with VMware in most enterprise private cloud greenfield bake offs. Will Red Hat lose a reseller champion and take a cloud revenue hit? Time will tell.
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About the Author
Kamesh Pemmaraju is the vice president of Product Marketing at Mirantis. Kamesh has a deep knowledge of the cloud marketplace and the OpenStack ecosystem along with a rare mix of entrepreneurial/start-up experience, passionate customer focus, and strong technical expertise. Prior to Mirantis, Kamesh owned product management responsibilities for the Dell OpenStack initiative where he was directly responsible for the launch of several comprehensive private cloud solutions based on OpenStack and related technologies such as Ceph. Previously, Kamesh held both executive engineering and business roles with a number of technology companies and consulting firms. He has a strong technology start-up experience including running his own consulting business for a few years. Kamesh co-authored the critically acclaimed “Leaders in the Cloud” and “Leaders in Mobility” industry studies. He holds a MS in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Science.
