Red Hat Survey Delivers Enterprise OpenStack Findings

Enterprise IT organizations are moving, or planning to move to OpenStack for their cloud infrastructure, a new survey from Red Hat finds. The OpenStack enterprise adoption survey 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).

Notably, Red Hat's 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: 

_ 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). 

- 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).

We've often stressed here at OStatic that support will be a key differentiator among OpenStack service providers.  The Red Hat survey found that production-level technical support (82 percent) is the most important aspect of commercial OpenStack offerings, followed by simplified installation processes (78 percent).

Red Hat is tying its future to cloud computing and the OpenStack platform and has a strong history of providing solid support. It's likely that we'll hear much more from the company this year about enterprise adoption of OpenStack.