Paypal To Drop VMware From 80,000 Servers and Replace It With OpenStack (Updated) - Forbes

 

(Update: VMware Loses More Than $2 Billion in Market Cap on PayPal / Ebay Rumors)

Boris Renski, co-founder of Mirantis, an OpenStack consultancy as well as OpenStack Foundation board member recently told Business Insider that PayPal is in the midst of replacing VMware on about 10,000 computer servers. Those servers will go live this summer, Renski said. “The grand vision for project is, over time, they will replace all of their virtual infrastructure with OpenStack, not just PayPal, but PayPal and eBay, together,” Renski said. That’s about 80,000 servers across their data centers, he said.

“At PayPal, we are committed to collaborating with the open source community to drive further innovation. That’s why we are thrilled to be working with Mirantis to leverage OpenStack to help transform our global infrastructure into an agile and open cloud platform,” said Saran Mandair, Senior Director of Platform Engineering and Operations. “Our OpenStack project uses the Fuel library by Mirantis, which has dramatically accelerated our OpenStack deployment with robust, production-grade architecture while giving us the flexibility to tailor OpenStack to our needs.”

Backed by Intel and Dell, Mirantis has emerged as a clear leader in the OpenStack world heavily promoting and supporting the adoption of the platform originally developed by NASA and Rackspace. Based in the Bay Area the company created a local OpenStack user group and offers its popular monthly Boot Camp training to expand the pool of skilled engineering expertise in OpenStack.

Why is this interesting?

News of VMware being dropped is interesting for a number of reasons. Primarily the story shows the shifting view of virtualization and related services and how they are being purchased within larger enterprise contexts. Companies like Ebay / Paypal spend millions on its data center infrastructure and view it as a competitive advantage. It seems that larger web companies are beginning to prefer custom ‘packaged’ infrastructure software with specialized consulting over more traditional approaches.

One commentator on the Business Insider post points out “In the actual world, OpenStack is not really free – one still has to pay tonnes of money to the “Consultants” who will implement & maintain the OpenStack   This is just like RedHat - which makes money from IT services and gives away Linux for free.”

In the OpenStack space companies like Mirantis, Piston Cloud, CloudScaling, Nebula and even IBM, Canonical and Red Hat are begining to benefit from this new consultant centric view of IT rather then the more traditional one size fits all approach of data center software popularized by VMware.

Making things even more complicated is VMware must now walk the line as both a member of the OpenStack Foundation, which puts it in a tough position as both a contributor as well as a competitor to the OpenStack project. Last October VMware announced support for its ESX hypervisor in OpenStack and its Nicira’s work in the virtual networking Quantum project, as well its effort of integrating its Cloud Foundry platform as a service, which it has partnered with Piston Cloud on. VMware’s RabbitMQ, an open source middleware-type application deployment project, is also used heavily within the OpenStack community.

Some in the VMware camp don’t really know what to think of OpenStack. In a blog post last year, VMware Cloud director Mathew Lodge equated OpenStack and other open source platforms as the “ugly sisters.” His post goes on to say “cloud watchers were treated to the spectacle of a dust-up between IaaS software camps jockeying to be the fairest cloud vendor of them all. Like a bad remake of a Brothers Grimm fairytale, it seemed like the ugly sisters had gotten the message from the magic mirror that they were not the fairest in the land, and had decided to brew some potions, wave a few wands and declare themselves most attractive cloud IaaS platform.”

At the end of the day VMware is in a difficult position as the market for virtualization / cloud computing software is quickly changing. As this change occurs VMware will need to figure what side of the fence they sit on or risk being left behind as potentially more companies leave its software for more “open” options. Lest we forget the RIM / Blackberry story.

– Update –

VMware has posted statement on its blog. “Partnership, Choice and the Hybrid Cloud”

Bogomil Balkansky Sr Vice President, Cloud Infrastructure Platform at VMware had this to say “There is an emerging class of technology providers—like eBay, Google and Amazon—with large-scale engineering organizations developing customized infrastructure solutions. For these companies, their infrastructure is literally their product…and they invest deeply to create solutions optimized for very specific business needs. However, this level of investment in custom solutions is typically not cost effective for most businesses. The commercially supported solutions that serve these customers make the bulk of the market. There is a ton of innovation in this market, which VMware is privileged to serve. Our relationship with eBay and PayPal is a partnership we’re proud of, and a great example of the role VMware plays in both typical customer environments and in a bleeding-edge cloud development initiative.” Read more here.

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