What role does open source play in cloud computing innovation?
September 23, 2012
Why use open source for building and designing cloud? Because open-source software stacks offer a huge amount of customizeability so the cloud you build actually does what you need it to do — and without huge licensing fees. How can open-source cloud management tools like Eucalyptus, CloudStack, OpenStack and OpenNebula (the European open-source cloud effort of which I am director) impact the adoption of cloud technology? I see it happening in a few broad ways.
Lowering the barrier to entry
First, most organizations adopt cloud to optimize their IT investment, to improve existing services or to support new business and service models. In this scenario, open-source lowers the barriers for new organizations to build their private cloud. Many organizations have adopted OpenNebula to build their private cloud. Some are very small clouds with tens of hosts, some are very large infrastructures composed of several data centers. In many of these cases, paying license fees for commercial software was simply not an option. In such cases, the choice comes down to open source cloud or no cloud at all…
Facilitating custom clouds
Second, many organizations like the fact that open source allows great customization to meet individual requirements. They can build a differentiated cloud service to meet customers needs. Two good examples in the public sector are the Dutch Supercomputing Center SARA with its HPC Cloud facility and FermiLab’s FermiCloud infrastructure. Hosting companies and telcos use open source to offer new cloud provision models for a specific market segment or geography. In OpenNebula’s case, two examples are AlterWay with its H2O Cloud and China Mobile with its Big Cloud that will support more than 600 million customers.
Read more from the source @ http://gigaom.com/2012/09/22/what-role-does-open-source-play-in-cloud-computing-innovation/