Survey: Enterprise Private Clouds Driving OpenStack Adoption

OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system, is not the most widely deployed private-cloud platform. But it's a close second, according to a new survey from database vendor Tesora, which also said the rise in OpenStack adoption is helping push organizations toward scalable database and database-as-a-service (DBaaS) solutions.

The survey results indicate that among responding organizations, 15 percent are running private clouds on VMware, followed by 11 percent using OpenStack.

But there's more to the story than those numbers, since many of the organizations surveyed were not using a private cloud at all. Among those that were, OpenStack accounted for a third of the private cloud market share. Those are encouraging results for a cloud-computing platform that is much newer than VMware's offerings, and still largely in the early adoption phase among enterprises.

Also significant was that 40 percent of the organizations responding to the survey—which engaged a broad set of industries—counted more than 1,000 employees. The fact that OpenStack is popular within that crowd is notable because the last major collection of data regarding OpenStack adoption, which the OpenStack Foundation completed in May 2014, focused on smaller organizations with fewer than 20 employees. Tesora's findings reflect OpenStack's strength within a broader segment of the channel.

Tesora, which provides open source DBaaS solutions, also reported that most survey respondents were using traditional database solutions, including Microsoft (MSFT) SQL Server, MySQL and Oracle (ORCL), within their private clouds. But it also said that "While more than half of all respondents indicated that they are likely or very likely to use their company’s DBaaS on a private cloud, 31 percent plan on implementing or have implemented DBaaS in a private cloud."

That news bodes well for Tesora and other organizations working on next-generation database solutions for the cloud, which only stand to become more popular as OpenStack supplants legacy private-cloud platforms.