Open-Source Sees Rapid Growth in the Cloud Market

The open-source cloud market has undoubtedly evolved over the past two years, seeing rapid, 72 percent growth between 2012 and 2014. According to Zenoss Inc.’s 2014 State of the Open Source Cloud survey, this growth includes an increasing dominance of the OpenStack platform in this space.

The research noted an increasing penetration of open-source in general: of the 69 percent of respondents are using a cloud in any form, 43 percent of them said that they were using an open-source cloud.

Out of those users, satisfaction with open-source clouds continues to grow; 77 percent reported satisfaction with their open source cloud, up from 71 percent in the 2012 survey.

The study also found that a full 69 percent of respondents who use an open-source cloud use the OpenStack platform. However, major challenges remain here, including a lack of in-house specialized skills, and lack of support, which continues to hold back cloud adoption in some organizations.

Outside of OpenStack specifically, significant challenges related to efficiently managing the underlying IT infrastructure that supports cloud services and improving uptime also persist.

“Despite the tremendous growth in open source cloud adoption, enterprises still face big hurdles around effectively monitoring and managing their cloud infrastructure,” said Alan Conley, CTO and senior vice president at Zenoss.

Sheer multiplicity is one issue. In fact, 41 percent of organizations surveyed who are considering an open source cloud plan on buying a unified monitoring tool to monitor their cloud services. Only 8 percent of current open source cloud users are using a unified monitoring tool today.

Conley stated, “79 percent of organizations still use multiple tools to manage their cloud instead of a unified monitoring solution, which is very inefficient.” And continued “Moving to a unified monitoring solution would reduce costs and inefficiencies and improve the performance and availability and their cloud services.”

In terms of technologies and vendors, the survey found that more than 86 percent of prospective open-source cloud users are considering the OpenStack platform, followed by CloudStack at 43.9 percent. OpenNebula and Eucalyptus were tied for third at 19.7 percent. Also, 32 percent of the organizations are using converged infrastructure to build their open source clouds; Dell Active Systems is the leader.