Jonathan Cham is a Global Solutions Consultant who helps global companies transform and accelerate the way IT is delivered to their customers. He focuses on open source, cloud operations and management solutions. He currently consults with organizations on how to approach the software defined datacenter model and create business value for the IT organization.
Jonathan has a MS in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University and MBA from USC and has worked in various technical roles in his career. In his free time, he has ambitious goals to be a decent basketball player.
This is the first of a three part series about our OpenStack distribution.
Since OpenStack Grizzly, VMware has committed to contributing and integrating with the OpenStack platform. Our heritage with OpenStack is rich— Nicira, now our VMware NSX™ platform, initiated the Open vSwitch and Neutron projects. Through these projects, since 2010, we’ve built a tremendous amount of experience and expertise with large production OpenStack deployments. Our highly available internal production environment runs between 5,000-7,000 instances. Due to the production nature of this environment, we ensure no data-plane downtime during patching, updating and upgrading of our environment. All OpenStack technologies we offer are used internally to operationalize and manage our environment.
Throughout the last several years, we’ve taken on a supporting role to our partners in the OpenStack community. It was during this period that we realized that many of our customers did not have the right expertise and experience to transition from an OpenStack proof of concept to a real OpenStack production environment. Our customers have stated that patching, upgrading, documentation, supportability, and operational complexity are all part of the growing pains with OpenStack. This is the nature of large open source projects. Large number of collaborators working on different projects that eventually need to come together and form a unified solution is not trivial. So you may ask yourself: “This is open source, can’t I hire smart developers to manage the complexity of integration, patching, updating, and upgrading the different projects within OpenStack?” Absolutely. There are large companies that successfully do this today. These companies are typically software companies in the business of building a highly unique and customized cloud for very specific scenarios. The question is, do you have the human capital to take this approach? Are you in the business of maintaining the uptime and stability of your cloud? What is the total cost of ownership of this approach? Are you in the business of building a cloud, or building applications?
We built our own distribution, VMware Integrated OpenStack™, specifically to address the customer need of building a working cloud with best-of-breed components. Let VMware manage the deployment, upgrade, patching, documentation, and support for you while you do what’s valuable to your business– providing immediate access to compute, network and storage so developers can build revenue-generating applications. The OpenStack distribution is the same distribution we use internally at VMware so it is tested with the utmost reliability, availability, manageability, performance, security and scale.
OpenStack is important to us; besides providing a production-grade distribution, we support and extend our distribution with NSX, vSphere®, VMware vRealize™ Log Insight™, and vRealize™ Operations™. Each of those components have valuable extensions to improve how we manage, operationalize, and provide Day 2 visibility in OpenStack. Remember, having a cloud is just one piece of the puzzle. Operating, managing and retaining happy customers are all just as important.
VMware is committed to OpenStack more than ever before and we are excited to share how we can help you build the next-generation datacenter with it. OpenStack is not easy, but we promise to make it so.
Look for our second article on “Addressing OpenStack Pain Points” in the next several weeks!
VMware, vRealize Operations, vRealize Log Insight, vSphere and NSX are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions. The use of the word “partner” or “partnership” does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.
