Chris Minnis
Enterprise Architect
We’ve all heard the rumors, OpenStack is hard. To get it up and running in your environment is painful, and guaranteed to have a couple of false starts before you get it right. At least that’s what we’ve heard…
Open source, especially OpenStack, can require the efforts of not an individual, but a team. That team has to know the business and the technology intimately, and they need to be able to navigate where the business can adapt and where the technology must adapt. The particular challenge with OpenStack is making those decisions, as they often require choosing among modules or writing your own.
Your new infrastructure’s design really doesn’t manifest until you’ve lived with OpenStack for a while, and there are many consultants that can provide a definitive path. What you want, what you need, is a methodology that prevents the wasting of time. You need to eliminate the wrong turns and dead ends, as quickly as possible.
This is where Red Hat excels. They are a company built on making the difficult significantly easier, and providing support where there was none before. If you think of Red Hat as simply a Linux distribution company, you’re simply misinformed. They’ve been branching out, even beyond the data center, for years now. For an enterprise to adopt OpenStack, and to bet your collective farm on open source, Red Hat is almost required.