The open source cloud territory is a hot button topic for IT in today’s age of transition, as legacy systems struggle to keep up with demand and the underlying infrastructure behind our networks and storage becomes fragmented across a variety of Services.  As the enterprise seeks improved solutions, open source cloud offerings deliver hopeful promise but little else.  A great deal remains undeveloped in the immature industry emerging around open source cloud tools, but the opportunities are worthy in the end.

Zenoss Cloud Evangelist Floyd Strimling has plenty to say on the matter, making his case for the commercialization of the open source cloud in order to bring it up to the standards required to fix an ailing enterprise.  It seems everyone has an opinion on how to fix the “legacy problem,” and Strimling takes on an entire industry with a critical eye on the misconceptions of open source cloud solutions, looking at the big picture when describing the changes that need to, and will likely occur in the coming years.

In today’s Snapshot Series Strimling discusses the open source cloud with a tone of realism, revealing his own vision of IT’s future in the process.  Unified communications is a must for the enterprise where niche solutions and their respective departments must learn to work together towards a common goal.  We’ll also hear how Zenoss fits into the big picture, and learn why Strimling likes Batman over Ironman.

See the entire CEO Series with Kristen Nicole on Pinterest and Springpad!

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What’s the biggest misconception about the current open source cloud industry?

The biggest misconception about the open source cloud industry lies within its very definition. For the technical elite, all roads to an open source cloud leads to either OpenStack or CloudStack with varying opinions on the underlying hypervisor technology. For the Enterprise, open source clouds are still a bit of a mystery as proprietary vendors have dominated the market.

Additionally, the expectations regarding open source clouds continue to rise to new and uncontrollable levels.  While I am a huge supporter of open source technologies and continue to promote them as viable alternatives to their proprietary counterparts, the fact remains that many of these projects are still immature and evolving. What is needed is the commercialization of these open source technologies a la Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Citrix CloudPlatform, Eucalyptus Cloud, Piston Cloud, Nebula, and more to penetrate the enterprise market and fight it out for supremacy.

We’re undoubtedly shifting into an I/O-centric enterprise. Where does Zenoss fit into this transition?

Instead of an I/O-centric enterprise, I’d characterize this shift as delivering IT as a Service through flexible, open, and agile delivery models. These models include private clouds, public clouds, hybrid clouds, and legacy infrastructure such as UNIX and mainframe infrastructure.  Unfortunately, the unintended consequence of this shift or evolution in IT is complexity and that is where Zenoss enters the equation.

Today, more then ever, it is critical to properly instrument and monitor your IT infrastructure.  However, it is not enough to simply provide elemental monitoring (disk, cpu, memory, etc.) rather one must be able to put the puzzle pieces together and view the elements as providing a service.  Zenoss provides the foundation to move beyond elemental monitoring to service-based impact while modeling your IT infrastructure and understanding the dynamic relationships between the infrastructure in real-time.  To put it simply, Zenoss organizes the chaos and provides a common “language” across traditional IT silos such as compute, server, storage, network, virtualization, and more.

How will cross-department analysis and communications change the enterprise landscape/job market?

It is undeniable that x86 virtualization has put preverbal cracks-in-the-wall between the traditional IT silos.  However, the fact remains that the disparate IT disciplines are equally complex in their own right and require a degree of specialization.  However, communication and unification of systems is critical to the success of the cloud era.

Therefore, IT disciplines must work together to solve complex issues while maintaining business continuity.  Deploying 5, 10, 20 or more tools to solve niche problems are a short-term Band-Aid and not a long-term solution.  By rationalizing IT tools, investing in automation, and providing cross-domain analytics capabilities, IT can provide for their own communication needs as well as those of other business stakeholders.

You’ve mentioned the importance of virtualization in infrastructure evolution in the coming years.  What other changes do you expect for infrastructure in the next decade?

Honestly, I struggle to rationalize my vision of the future with the reality of the IT industry as a whole.  My vision revolves around open source technologies, converged infrastructure, and cloud based delivery mechanisms.  However, the reality is the world runs on critical legacy infrastructure that has few alternatives to be replaced that is dominated by billion dollar corporations who will fight tooth-and-nail to keep their revenue streams alive.

Faster, simpler, and more agile infrastructure is needed across all IT silos.  We have critical issues to solve within storage, mobile infrastructure, and networking.  Meanwhile, applications need to become more aware of the infrastructure and less dependent on the underlying operating system or hypervisor.  It is truly an exciting time, but don’t think for one moment that today’s cloud paradigm is the end-all for IT as it never is!

As a cloud evangelist you often have to provide an optimistic perspective of tomorrow.  What gives you confidence in the future?

While life has many elements including frustrations, disappointments, and joy, its simply too short not to be an optimist.  It is important to remember where we came from and to ponder where we are going.  I grew up in a world where cable was just starting, pay phones were everywhere, and we learned to type on a manual typewriter.  I remember running to the computer lab to see a “workstation” and struggling to get my Fortran program running.

Today’s world is simply amazing as we have smartphones that keep us connected, instant access to information across the globe, access to compute power that was reserved for only Governments, and a spirit of innovation that is simply contagious.  My confidence resides in my own experience and the belief that today’s open source culture can and will rise up to solve today’s challenges and tomorrow’s opportunities!

Illustration by Danny Haas

CLOUD KEEPER

FLOYD STRIMLING

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Batman or Ironman?

Batman, he’s stood the test of time.

Person that’s influenced you most in life?

My Wife, she’s my love, my best friend, and my rock.

Favorite era for IT?

Roaring 20’s