Convenience trumps 'open' in clouds and data centers

Sorry OpenStack and Open Compute, we're not all Facebook

Open Compute may not compute

Nor is life much better over in Open Compute Land. While the Facebook project (which aims to open source Facebook’s datacentre designs) has the promise to create a world filled with hyper-efficient data centres, the reality is that most enterprises simply aren’t in a position to follow Facebook’s lead.

As Stanford professor (and data centre expert) Jon Koomey notes: “If the customer is on the ball and is really driving down cost per compute, they should be receptive to what Open Compute offers. But this only happens in places where there is one owner of the data centre and one budget, which is a minority of the enterprises.”

Back in 2012, Bechtel IT exec Christian Reilly lambasted Open Compute, declaring that: “Look how many enterprises have jumped on Open Compute. Oh, yes, none. That would be correct.”

While that’s not true – companies such as Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Fidelity have climbed aboard the Open Compute bandwagon – it’s still the case that few companies are in a position to capitalize on Facebook’s open designs.

Indeed, IDC analyst Matt Eastwood indicates that reception to Open Compute remains “mixed,” with the only big customers being service providers and large financials, with “confusion in the enterprise” blocking greater adoption.

This may change, of course. Companies such as HP are piling into the Open Compute community to make it easier, with HP building a new server line based on Open Compute designs, as but one example.

And while some have had false starts in their Open Compute enthusiasm (Cisco is notable in this regard, indicating that: “Our marketing folks [got] a bit ahead of our engineers” in terms of releasing open networking switches for Open Compute – momentum continues to gather.

Over time, the project may well pay off for an increasingly wide audience. Just not yet. The reality is that most private clouds fail, whatever the stripe of openness you prefer.

Indeed, by Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman’s estimation, a colossal 95 per cent of all private clouds fail. When he asked attendees at Gartner’s Datacentre Conference “What is going wrong with your private cloud?”, the responses essentially declared, “Everything!”