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Fujitsu CTO: Analysts might think we're 'crazy', but OpenStack here we come

All internal system to run on cloudy software

Exclusive Fujitsu EMEA’s chief techie has dismissed the naysayers as the organisation embarks on a five-year project to migrate all of its internal systems to OpenStack.

According to 451Research, the OpenStack tech market will swell to $3.3bn in 2018, although reaching that level will not be without challenges, which Dr Joseph Reger, CTO at the engineering giant, said are multiple.

“How old is OpenStack? Five years old. Linux, the operating system, needed ten years to become significant and twenty to dominate. There is maybe still a bit of breathing room there,” he told us.

Reger described OpenStack as being “rough around the edges”, and said the lack of enterprise features are the “major cause for complaints”, it is not scalable, and as always security “is an issue”.

“The negative reports you are reading about are customers who took the community release and thought they could do it themselves; quite a bit of complexity there, better to work for somebody who is a service provider for that kind of stuff,” he said.

Irrespective of the issues, Fujitsu is testing large configurations, and shifting 468 internal systems on the open source cloudy platform, and we are "fixing the issues as we go".

He said analysts may think Fujitsu is “crazy” by moving to Open Stack, but he said he doesn't "think they get it yet".

“I am not saying it will succeed for sure because nothing is for certain in this business, but I am saying let’s give it some slack; it’s very, very young,” Reger added.

The anticipated outcome is twofold – deploying private cloud implementations is an immediate priority, and cutting costs is also an area of consideration for the business.

“We’ve done the math for our own IT operations, and with the introduction of this new A5 cloud platform we hope to take out several millions a year of IT budget,” he added.

What’s the current IT budget? “We don’t say, but it is a big number," he added.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the biggest contributor to OpenStack, and is using this software as the backbone of its Helion Private Cloud. It seems like a long term bet but the best laid schemes of mice and men...

Bill Hilf, senior veep and GM for Hewlett Packard Enterprise cloud, revealed at Discover this week that his organisation is introducing lifecycle management. He said:

“That [will] help customers take a lot of the complexity out of an Open Stack deployment which has been the number one blocker for Open Stack around the world, being too ... difficult to configure and install.”

Through this, customers can roll out betas of office serving applications, run continuous patching, he said. HPE has also added networking tech for multi-data centre deployments of Helion Open Stack. ®

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