OpenStack's success depends on IBM and HP's tech queens

2010: A Space Odyssey

But it is not all roses. NASA was one of the two original founders of OpenStack with RackSpace. The space agency contributed its Nebula private cloud compute and storage software to Open Stack along with RackSpace's object storage technology in 2010.

It has evaluated private cloud provision and its OpenStack focus since then and withdrew from active OpenStack development (PDF) in July last year, saying it would focus on - heresy alert - public clouds. In its audit report NASA said:

While the private cloud alternative enables agencies to manage their critical IT services and control access to sensitive data directly, these benefits come at the high cost of owning and operating data centres. Conversely, the public cloud alternative frees organisations from the expense of data centre ownership but requires that they effectively manage contractor performance to ensure key business and IT security requirements are met.

The NASA report said: "After investing $19.7m, NASA suspended funding for Nebula in 2012 and shifted its cloud strategy to the purchase of cloud services from public providers."

Come back, NASA, all is forgiven

The big, big thing is that private cloud requires private data centres and the public cloud does not. Were NASA to return to the OpenStack fold that would send a resounding message throughout the IT cloud supply industry. So far it has not.

It could well be that NASA was simply incompetent at managing its own private cloud initiatives and we shouldn't draw any negative conclusions about OpenStack from its withdrawal. It happened a couple of years or so ago and the OpenStack software has moved on since then.

But we must also remember suppliers like VMware would far rather customers used its overall data centre vSphere-centric resource-managing software rather than OpenStack. (Apart from VCloud Director which we're told is directly equivalent to what OpenStack provides.) What proprietary IT supplier does not prefer its customers to inhabit a walled garden with a price for admission and presence?

We hear that business IT might obey a CIO-level use-OpenStack directive and then use OpenStack links/support from installed proprietary suppliers like VMware to carry on using their proprietary kit because it meets operational business needs far better than a pure OpenStack, KVM-only, Linux-only route would do.

Perhaps the two main proprietary IT supplier sponsors of OpenStack – HP and IBM – will do for it what IBM did for Linux several years ago, and legitimise it.

The attendees at the OpenStack summit here in Paris would be greatly encouraged if the two monarchs of the IT industry, IBM's Ginni Rometty and HP's Meg Whitman, carry on dipping their hands into their wallets and showering billions of development, support and marketing dollars to encourage OpenStack adoption.

HP's Helion OpenStack cloud and IBM's SoftLayer OpenStack clouds are giant-ish steps in the right direction.

If they do this and get mass adoption by enterprises of their clouds in preference to those of Amazon, Google and Microsoft, then OpenStack will have justifiable optimism about its future prospects. If they don't do this, if there is only OpenStack lip service, then it's effectively going to be "Off with their heads" – with the executioner's axe wielded by Messrs Bezos, Page and Nadella. ®