This week’s OpenStack Summit event, brought to you live by SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE, is being held at Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta. In this interview, Dave Meyer, CTO and Chief Scientist at Brocade, sat down with John Furrier and Stu Miniman to talk about the power and influence of the OpenStack community.

Furrier started asking Meyer about the viability of OpenStack and where it is in the life cycle of adoption. Meyer responded saying that it’s becoming a closer reality for everyone. The tooling around distributions and deployments are becoming open source, and quickly. Referencing Comcast’s John Brzozowski’s talk at the event, he explained that Comcast can figure all of their XFINITY boxes within OpenStack in the US, which is a huge deployment at a large scale.

Meyer then went on to say that the relationship between the network and OpenStack is solidifying. “What you’re going to see is these really robust virtualization technologies in the open source community that are comprised of these layered architectures – OpenStack and OpenDaylight,” Meyer added.

Continuing on from Meyer’s mention of OpenDaylight (ODL), Miniman asked Meyer about what he’s heard from the OpenStack community. Meyer said that the community is really interested in ODL. The communities that Brocade is involved in, as well as their customers, are excited about the amount of network knowledge and network infrastructure that’s in ODL really augments OpenStack.

Brocade, OpenStack and innovation

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Miniman then began discussing the fact that Brocade is hiring a lot of people in OpenStack and ODL, asking Meyer to talk more about that. Meyer said, when he arrived at Brocade 16 months ago, his goal was to build an open source team that would drive innovation into open source projects. He also wanted that team to be actively involved in the community because that’s where the innovation comes from. Meyer then added that, although his team has come together well, they still have to execute.

In terms of what’s new with Brocade and OpenStack, Meyer said that they’ve had a few demos at the Summit: one was integration of OpenStack with VCS fabric products and then a few others about the integration of the Vyatta 5600 router with ODL and OpenStack.

“Those kinds of solutions are really getting much more robust, much more functional at just an incredible rate,” said Meyer. He added that he expects to see all of the three products bundled together in the near future.

Referencing a keynote that talked about NFV, Miniman then went on to ask how Vyatta fits in to the OpenStack mix. Meyer said that Vyatta is the perfect solution for NFV’s set of use cases, which includes things like sub-virtual routers, ADXs and load balancers. Additionally, high forwarding performance in software is a problem that they’ve been working out in NFV. Meyer also mentioned that NFV is looking towards open source. “That universe of things is really coming together right now,” said Meyer.

OpenStack for Management

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Miniman then began talking about how OpenStack needs to grow in the management space, asking Meyer for his insight on this hot topic. Meyer responded that a lot of the management infrastructure is now going into open source and believes that “will start accelerating as well in the same way that OpenStack and OpenDaylight are.”

Adding the fact that one of the pieces of feedback that they gotten from show is that Neutron still needs work to get done, Miniman asked Meyer about his view point on how this gets solved and what needs to happen in order to good performance, scalability and reliability out of networking in an OpenStack environment. Meyer responded, “Neutron will talk to OpenDaylight for the detailed, fine-grained management of devices, and at the Neutron level, you’ll be doing orchestration.”

Furrier then asked if Neutron’s multi-vendor aspect is going to be a problem or if it’s going to change. Meyer believes that this won’t be a problem and responded saying that, as these projects evolve and mature, “people will create the kind of infrastructure that they want based on what people are interested in and what they want to do.”

Low Barrier to entry

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Bringing the discussion to the OpenStack Summit itself, Furrier asked Meyer what he’s been seeing at the event that’s now on his radar, that may or may not have been before.

Meyer said that one of the main things is the fact that the barrier to entry is so low. Going into this further, he said that you don’t need an infrastructure and that you have knowledge on-demand because the community focuses on teaching other members.

He’s also noticed that things are accelerating in a dramatic way, meaning that there are a lot projects and interesting versions of the same ideas because it’s getting easier to do, and that what you build isn’t as important as how you build it anymore.

• Where OpenStack is Heading and Advice for CIOs

Furrier then questioned Meyer about where he thinks OpenStack is heading. Meyer likened OpenStack to a version of Linux kernel. Some complexities will be abstracted away, a few things will be hardened and then there’s the process of building on top of it.

Following that, Furrier asked Meyer to offer some advice for CIOs who are considering OpenStack. Once again bringing up the power and influence of the OpenStack community, Meyer said that the best thing to do would be to get involved and become a core contributor. Becoming a deep and serious part of the OpenStack community comes back through your ability to develop, produce and maintain products.