Friday Five — April 29, 2016

Working with Big Switch Networks, Dell and Red Hat, Verizon said it has just wrapped up "the industry's largest-known" network functions virtualization (NFV) OpenStack cloud deployment across five of its data centers in the U.S... Verizon, which announced its NFV deployment during today's kickoff of the OpenStack Summit in Austin, began the project in 2015. The company added that the project is being deployed at other data centers and sites across the U.S. and will also expand to international sites over the next few months. Verizon said that it also plans to use the NFV design in its edge network sites by the end of the year... In its deployment, Verizon used OpenStack with Red Hat Ceph Storage, along with Big Switch's Big Cloud Fabric for SDN (software-defined networking) controller software that manages Dell switches. The entire deployment is orchestrated using the Red Hat OpenStack Platform.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has built a private cloud based on Red Hat OpenStack Platform, saving significant time and resources spent on datacenters by retooling and consolidating their in-house hardware. JPL, NASA's primary center for robotic exploration of the solar system, used Red Hat's OpenStack and Linux technology to modernize its on-premise storage and server capacity, giving them the ability to support hundreds of JPL mission scientists and engineers. NASA's JPL has led many significant achievements in space exploration, from creating America's first satellite to sending a spacecraft to every planet in the solar system and launching all four of the Mars rovers. Today, these exploratory missions rely more significantly on cloud computing capabilities to process requests from flight projects and researchers working with mission data... JPL engineers built an on-site OpenStack cloud for the large and flexible cloud computing capacity they could offer mission scientists and engineers, planning to move critical compute activities that needed to be on-site into a more efficient private cloud architecture.

Red Hat announced the creation of Red Hat Open Innovation Labs, a consulting service that helps companies integrate people, methodology, and technology to solve business challenges in an accelerated fashion. As part of an Open Innovation Labs consulting engagement, customers will work collaboratively in a residency-oriented lab environment with Red Hat experts to jumpstart innovation and software development initiatives using open source technology and DevOps methods... The Red Hat Open Innovation Labs service helps customers rapidly develop and integrate applications using microservices, deploy them in containers, and deliver them using DevOps methodologies across physical, cloud and mobile environments that can quickly scale up or down on-demand. With Red Hat, customers can innovate with speed, agility, scalability and increased security.

Technical discussions around OpenStack, its features, and adoption are copious. Customers, specifically their finance managers, have a bigger question: "What will OpenStack really cost me?" OpenStack is open source, but its adoption and deployment incur costs otherwise. So, what is the OpenStack TCO (total cost of ownership)? There has been no systematic answer to this question–until now. Massimo Ferrari and Erich Morisse, strategy directors at Red Hat, embarked on a project to calculate the TCO of OpenStack-based private cloud over the years of its useful life. The result was a TCO model that they share in their talk Elephant in the Room: What's the TCO for an OpenStack Cloud? at the OpenStack Summit in Austin, Texas... One of the interesting things we've found from talking to customers about this TCO model is the selection of public versus private cloud is no longer black and white, and the decisions may vary whether organizations are selecting a cloud for an application (such as a line of business might do) or optimizing use and cost across a wide set of application... But, the answer, from the financial perspective, has a lot has to do with the technology selection and the potential impact on the operations teams. Whatever makes it easier for your operations team to get more done will have the largest beneficial financial impact.

Leading organizations across Europe, including Fastweb, Paddy Power Betfair, and Produban, have deployed Red Hat OpenStack Platform as the backbone of their cloud initiatives... "We selected Red Hat because of the innovative nature of the technology and Red Hat's open source approach. We also liked that our customers recognize and trust OpenStack. Thanks to Red Hat, we have created a new source of competitive advantage and solidified our position as a leading cloud provider in Italy. With Red Hat, we are well-positioned to lead innovation in our market" [says Mirko Santocono, product manager, Cloud Computing Services, Fastweb].