I was awoken this morning with a flood of emails regarding the following statement written by Alan Shimel and published in Computerworld Australia.
With recent negative reports from Gartner and Zenoss, it seems “dump on open source Cloud” season is open. For those quick to point the finger at some of these technologies that may not have the market share some expected, it would be good to remember that without open source it would be difficult to have a Cloud at all.
It reminded me of a famous quote by Mark Twain:
Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.
While I appreciate Zenoss’ State of Open Source Clouds Survey being held in the same regard as Gartner’s research, I wouldn’t go that far. Apparently Mr. Shimel neither read the full State of Open Source Clouds report nor understands that Zenoss is a commercial open source company that is deeply involved with open source clouds throughout the world. In fact, in every briefing with reporters and analysts, we stressed that the adoption of open source clouds is a three horse race and that it’s too early to declare winners and losers of this monumental effort.
Let’s look at his top 10 vs. Zenoss’ Cloud Creds:
- OpenShift and Cloud Foundry – Zenoss is an early adopter of Cloud Foundry and released a Cloud Foundry ZenPack in May of 2011. As for OpenShift, just wait and see.
- MySQL – Zenoss Core utilizes MySQL Community Server
- JavaScript – Excuse me, but Python is the language of the Cloud
- KVM – Apparently Mr. Shimel didn’t see that Zenoss is a member of the OVA which promotes KVM, and produced a webinar entitled Monitoring Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3, a webinar that was promoted by the OVA
- CloudStack – Zenoss participates in Build A Cloud Days and has offered a CloudStack ZenPack since November of 2011
- Xen Hypervisor – Zenoss has a ZenPack for that
- NoSQL – What’s your point?
- OpenStack – Zenoss is an early OpenStack member and has offered an OpenStack ZenPack since September of 2011
- Hadoop – See 2 above.
- Linux – Zenoss only supports Linux and is a proud member of the Linux Foundation
From my count, Zenoss supports or is involved with 7 of 10 of Shimel’s 10 open source projects that power the Cloud. Therefore it is obvious that Zenoss does “Dump on Open Source Clouds” and wants the proprietary vendors to win this war. (This is a sarcastic comment, as I wouldn’t want it taken out of context 
) Additionally, Mr. Shimel shows his open source cloud naivety by leaving out the likes of Eucalyptus, Opscode, and Puppet within his top 10 list.
In the end, Zenoss maintains our own open source project and promotes open source technologies for cloud computing and more. Our cloud survey simply pointed out that very few of our over 100,000 community members are currently deploying open source clouds. Also, amongst those who currently are deploying an open source cloud, OpenStack has a clear lead. However, amongst those who plan on deploying an open source cloud, OpenStack has some competition with both CloudStack and Eucalyptus.
Finally, I invite Mr. Shimel and everyone reading this post to join us for The State of Open Source Cloud Roundtable on Wednesday October 24th where the top 3 (not 2) open source cloud providers will be represented.
The panel includes:
- Rob Hirschfeld, OpenStack Board Member and Principal Cloud Architect at Dell
- Mark Hinkle, Senior Director, Cloud Computing Community at Citrix
- Greg DeKoenigsberg, Vice President Community at Eucalyptus
- Floyd Strimling, Vice President Community, Technical Evangelist at Zenoss
Event Details
Date: Wednesday, October 24th
Time: 2:00 pm EDT/ 11:00 am PDT/ 6:00 pm GMT
Duration: 1 hour
Registration link
