The recent OpenStack: Breaking into the Enterprise Forum highlighted some of the platform's ongoing challenges in the enterprise. To many would-be adopters, OpenStack looks a lot different than traditional infrastructure solutions, and there continues to be uncertainty about what skills and degree of expertise IT technicians need in order to effectively manage an OpenStack deployment.
According to Solinea CTO Ken Pepple, companies are looking for OpenStack solutions that feature graphical user interfaces, easily understood installers and management tools reminiscent of an ERP system. However, as IT World's Nancy Gohring pointed out, such an arrangement is rare, and instead most OpenStack offerings do not have this middle ground between sophistication and usability, either possessing just a few packaged/supported features or being so tightly integrated that they require specific types of hardware. However, Pepple stated that more balanced solutions may become available throughout 2014.
Getting OpenStack more traction in the enterprise may require new processes that better integrate end users and cloud storage providers. OpenStack executive director Jonathan Bryce argued that once vendors began turning parts of OpenStack into actual products, more enterprises may get on board.
"If you look at the biggest users that we have, a lot of them are working with vendors in some way, but some are doing this by themselves," observed Bryce, according to SiliconANGLE. "They tie in components from the storage and networking side, and I think that over the long term the broad base adoption is going to happen in concert with various other companies. Those companies are taking the bits that are OpenStack and they are turning them into products. That is a way that traditional enterprises are used to consuming technology."
The rising importance of software in the enterprise has already led to the rearchitecting of storage and networking infrastructure so that it's software-defined. By being compatible with a wide range of hardware, OpenStack may offer another step forward in building the modern data center.
