New OpenStack Survey Highlights Strong Adoption Plans Among Global Enterprises

DUBAI, UAE - May 21, 2015 - PRLog -- Enterprise IT organizations are moving, or planning to move to OpenStack for their cloud infrastructure, a new survey from Red Hat, Inc. , the world's leading provider of open source solutions, revealed.

The OpenStack enterprise adoption survey (http://www.techvalidate.com/product-research/red-hat-enterprise-linux/facts) of more than 310 IT decision makers and professionals from around the world, commissioned by Red Hat through TechValidate, found that the majority of respondents (75 percent) are planning to use OpenStack for cloud initiatives. The survey found respondents in varying stages of deployment, ranging from learning and evaluation (40 percent) and proof of concept / pilots (40 percent) to preparing for deployment (18 percent) and in production (16 percent).

The survey results show that deployment plans for OpenStack workloads span the physical, virtual, private and public cloud footprints. Survey respondents reported strong intent to run OpenStack workloads in other environments, including traditional enterprise virtualization (35 percent); physical servers (30 percent); other private / Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds (22 percent); and public clouds (18 percent).

Other key findings from the survey include:

·         OpenStack deployments span workload types. Fifty-nine (59) percent of respondents are using, or planning to use, OpenStack for new workloads optimized for cloud environments, while 52 percent of respondents are using or planning to use OpenStack for existing virtualized workloads.

·         Rapid growth and broad deployment plans lead to concerns about OpenStack skills development. Forty-five (45) percent of respondents cite lack of internal IT skills as the biggest barrier to OpenStack adoption. Other top barriers include: OpenStack’s maturity (43 percent); lack of alignment with current application architectures (22 percent); and poor alignment among internal organizations (21 percent).

·         Enterprise users are looking to address these concerns with offerings and support from commercial OpenStack providers. According to survey respondents, production-level technical support (82 percent) is the most important aspect of commercial OpenStack offerings, followed by simplified installation process (78 percent); the ability to move workloads between providers and platforms (75 percent); and support for complementary open source cloud management, operating system, and development tools (72 percent).

·         Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and containers are on the rise. Fifty-four (54) percent plan to use OpenStack with a PaaS, while 42 percent indicate that they plan to use containers within their OpenStack environments.

·         KVM is the hypervisor of choice for OpenStack, with 75 percent of respondents indicating that they are using, or planning to use it, in OpenStack deployments. Sixty-four (64) percent of survey respondents selected VMware vSphere ESXi, while 18 percent selected Microsoft Hyper-V, and 13 percent chose Xen.

·         Enterprise users are looking to OpenStack to reduce time to deployment, lower costs, and provide a more responsive IT infrastructure. According to survey respondents, the top three performance indicators for OpenStack projects include: reduced time of deployment of services (77 percent); reduced IT operational costs (52 percent); and a more responsive infrastructure to demand changes (44 percent).

Methodology and Demographics

TechValidate, an independent research company, conducted an online survey on behalf of Red Hat from April 28 - May 5, 2015, to understand enterprise adoption trends associated with OpenStack. The survey polled more than 310 enterprise IT decision makers and professionals from global organizations across industries and of all sizes, spanning small businesses to Fortune 500 organizations.

Supporting Quotes

Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, OpenStack, Red Hat

“These survey findings are a positive indication that OpenStack is growing as a preferred choice for building private and hybrid clouds. Withproduction-level support cited as a main concern around OpenStack deployments, we are excited about Red Hat being uniquely positioned address the need given our technical expertise around OpenStack as well as portfolio of open solutions, proven track record in delivering enterprise-class support and a full spectrum of training and services offerings to enable our customers to be successful.”