OpenStack pushes new private cloud delivery model
Tue 9 May 2017
As the OpenStack Summit takes place in Boston this week, the Foundation is keener than ever to drive a private cloud revolution and placed a key focus on the adoption of new private cloud as-a-service (PCaaS) offerings – remotely managed solutions in a user’s data centre of choice.
Opening the keynote sessions yesterday morning, Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation commented: ‘We’re at a major inflexion point in cloud. We’re seeing big growth in public cloud, and hybrid and multi-cloud use cases, but it may be a surprise to some to see this growth in the private cloud arena too.’
‘We have entered a second generation of private cloud. While the first generation focused on hyperscale and large environments, OpenStack has now opened up into new arenas that public cloud cannot handle, and has broadened the addressable market for cloud,’ Bryce continued.
A keynote address delivered by GE Healthcare director of digital operations, Patrick Weeks, also lauded the benefits of PCaaS in a highly-regulated industry. Having partnered with Rackspace, the company launched a remotely managed OpenStack solution called GEIX to migrate its applications to the cloud while maintaining control over its sensitive health data and the ability to access internal apps over its private network.
OpenStack highlighted that whether hosted on-premises or in a service provider’s data centre, PCaaS solutions place the responsibility with the vendor so business do not have to hire a team to manage the infrastructure. The company noted that customers can therefore ‘experience significant cost savings versus traditional infrastructure. Users can even achieve substantial savings over public cloud as scale increases and workloads stabilize.’
As part of the new PCaaS focus, Rackspace alongside Dell EMC announced a new partnership at the Summit. The collaboration seeks to cut barriers to entry for private cloud through a new utility-based consumption model. The service is expected to be made available from both companies in Q3 of this year.
According to Lauren Nelson, principal analyst at Forrester Research, ‘In 2017, enterprises are looking for a day 1 private cloud. Converged and/or remotely managed private cloud problem-solves this fundamental issue that has stalled productivity and adoption. This delivers the real speed of public but with the benefits of a local cloud.’
