Paypal (to) drop VMware for OpenStack

Mirantis, a large OpenStack consulting organization, announced that PayPal will be rolling 10,000 nodes running some variant of OpenStack “Cloud Operating System”.   They look to have a total of 80,000 nodes managed by OpenStack at the end of the Cloud deployment.  I was a little unclear on what this meant since OpenStack is Cloud management software and isn’t exactly a one for one replacement or even a direct competitor to VMware vSphere.  OpenStack is more comparable to vCloud and a little of vSphere but without the slick management interface.

If you were to build a private Cloud with the intent of building Cloud aware applications then OpenStack makes perfect sense.  However, if you are just looking to manage a traditional virtualized infrastructure then the argument of the ease of use for VMware over Openstack probrably makes for a better argument of “open” for most organization.

I’m really interested to see what the entire stack will be from hypervisor to management interface and tools.  Mirantis has said it is deploying the solution using it’s now open sourced “FUEL” solution which seems like adds some of the missing components needed to replace vSphere with OpenStack.  I’m pretty excited by the announcement and look forward to these solutions competing head to head.  In the mean time I will be asking for access to FUEL and doing a post on it at a later date.