{"id":660090,"date":"2013-05-24T12:08:22","date_gmt":"2013-05-24T16:08:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=649179"},"modified":"2013-05-24T12:08:22","modified_gmt":"2013-05-24T16:08:22","slug":"europe-warms-to-openstack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/660090","title":{"rendered":"Europe warms to OpenStack"},"content":{"rendered":"

OpenStack is finally taking off in Europe, it seems. As with most cloud infrastructure, uptake has been somewhat behind the curve here, but it looks like things are changing.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\"OpenStack<\/a><\/p>\n

OpenStack Foundation COO Mark Collier (L) and Executive Director Jonathan Bryce (R)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

According to OpenStack Foundation Executive Director Jonathan Bryce (pictured at the first OpenStack DACH Day in Berlin on Friday), the last 6 months have seen adoption pick up all over the world. However, it\u2019s a relatively new phenomenon in Europe and Asia, he added: <\/p>\n

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\u201cThere\u2019s more tolerance for early adoption around this technology in the U.S. We\u2019ve seen that not just in Europe, but in Asia as well. In the last few months we\u2019ve definitely seen people picking it up in other countries, and in some cases it means they\u2019re getting the benefit of all those early adopters.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

How about numbers? Well, that\u2019s tricky \u2013 because OpenStack is open-source, there\u2019s no way of nailing down precisely how many organizations and providers are using it. However, some big hitters are certainly getting publicly behind it.<\/p>\n

Marquee adopters<\/h2>\n

CERN, the European nuclear research organization that runs the Large Hadron Collider, is one of them. Although it\u2019s also involved with sort-of-OpenStack-rival (although less so these days<\/a>) OpenNebula, CERN has been toying with OpenStack<\/a> for a while and is now in the process of rolling out a 150,000-virtual machine private cloud<\/a> using the platform.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Deutsche Telekom has been involved with OpenStack for over a year now and has been using it to deliver a security service (along with fellow OpenStacker ClearPath) since March this year. This summer it will move more applications onto its OpenStack-based cloud, Kurt Garloff, head of cloud services engineering at the telco, said at Friday\u2019s event.<\/p>\n

And then we have the grand French clouds, Cloudwatt<\/a> and Numergy<\/a>, both of which are based on OpenStack.<\/p>\n

Why now?<\/h2>\n

According to OpenStack Foundation COO Mark Collier, the technological requirements of European users are the same as those of U.S. users, but the drivers for adoption are often different, \u201cparticularly around data sovereignty.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFor example, in France there are a lot of companies and policies that create an incentive to have local clouds where the data resides,\u201d he told me, pointing out that the open-source nature of the technology and its resulting widespread take-up by variously-sized outfits meant there were \u201chundreds of cities where you can get OpenStack.\u201d<\/p>\n

Florian Haas is the co-founder of Hastexo, a professional services company that isn\u2019t aligned with any vendor, but has found itself working a lot with OpenStack (it\u2019s a heavy contributor on the high availability front). He reckons Europe has been a slow cloud adopter due to a combination of legal and privacy concerns and a general \u201cdegree of conservatism\u201d but, now that cloud adoption is<\/em> happening, it\u2019s happening on OpenStack:<\/p>\n

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\u201cOf the big four [stacks] we\u2019re not seeing any OpenNebula, although interestingly there are a few German companies here [at LinuxTag] pushing it hard. We\u2019re not seeing any Eucalyptus. We\u2019re seeing a bit of CloudStack and a massive amount of OpenStack.<\/p>\n

\u201cEurope is late to the cloud party, but that creates an interesting situation, which is that much of Europe didn\u2019t go through the AWS uptake cycle. Strangely enough, OpenStack is filling a void, rather than displacing something else.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of the people we talk to are actually using OpenStack to essentially reorganize their data center. They might have old-style iron-and-wires data centers, or they might be running on proprietary virtual solutions. They\u2019re now considering public and private cloud, and OpenStack is the default.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

With this pace of change \u2014 everyone keeps talking about the last 6 months \u2014 it will be interesting to see how much further things have gone by our Structure:Europe<\/a> conference in London on 18-19 September, where we will of course be discussing issues such as stack choice.<\/p>\n

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