Zenoss has conducted a survey among IT operations specialists in order to evaluate virtualization, open source cloud and PaaS adoption. This article contains a digest of the survey results.
With The State of the Open Source Cloud 2012 survey, Zenoss has tried to evaluate data center virtualization and cloud computing usage. One of the main questions was related to the virtualization technology used, VMware taking the first spot with 74% followed by Linux KVM – 23.3%, and Microsoft Hyper-V with 19.6%. Several respondents noted that they were using multiple virtualization technologies, while 5.9% did not use any such technology. The graphic below shows all the responses to the virtualization question:
When asked about open source cloud adoption, the vast majority of respondents (82.8%) said they had not adopted such solution yet due to one of the following problems: maturity – 38.4%, lack of support – 30.7%, security – 28.7%, cost – 16.6%, and performance – 11.7%, but 57% of them added they were considering choosing one in the next 5 years. 63.2% would use OpenStack, 47% – CloudStack, while 23.5% – Eucalyptus. Those who would not consider an open source cloud cited No interest in cloud - 41.7%, Happy with current vendor – 38%, Lack of expertise – 30.1%, and Want a single vendor solution – 14.8%.
Among those who did adopt an open source cloud, half (50.5%) chose OpenStack, 18.3% – CloudStack, 9.2% – Eucalyptus, and 22% – other. They chose an open source solution for one or several reasons, in order: flexibility, open standards, no vendor lock-in, savings, or portability, and the majority were satisfied (44.4%) with their choice or very satisfied (26.9%), while 22.2% were neutral, 5.5% – somewhat dissatisfied, and 0.9% – very dissatisfied.
The survey also inquired about PaaS usage, with only 16.7% of the respondents employing such a solution, most of them GAE – 51.6%, followed by Azure – 18.7%, CloudFoundry – 15.4%, and OpenShift – 14.3%. 30% of those currently not using a PaaS added they consider one for the future: GAE – 40%, CloudFoundry – 17.5%, Other – 15.8%, Azure – 14.2%, and OpenShift – 12.5%. Interestingly enough, the vast majority (83.3%) of the respondents are not using PaaS, and 70% of them do not intend to do so in the future.
The survey was conducted by Zenoss Inc., provider of IT infrastructure monitoring software, among the Zenoss Open Source Community made of 100k operations professionals of which 628 voluntarily responded during Q3/2012, having the following roles in their organizations: system administrators – 39.4%, system architects – 15.5%, CIO/Upper management – 12.8%, network engineers – 12.5%, developers – 6.4% and others – 13.4%. Respondents came from all over the world, but the majority were from North America – 48%, Europe – 21%, and Central or South America – 9%.