PayPal Denies Reports That it Will Replace VMware with OpenStack
PayPal Denies Reports That it Will Replace VMware with OpenStack by UCStrategies Staff
Amidst recent reports that PayPal and its parent company eBay will replace its VMware software with OpenStack, the former has denied the claims stating that it currently has no intention of changing its servers to open source software.
The senior vice president of cloud infrastructure at VMware, Bogomil Balkansky, said that claims were completely false. He said: “Our relationship with eBay and PayPal is a partnership we're proud of, and a great example of the role VMware plays in both typical customer environments and in a bleeding-edge cloud development initiative.”
According to PayPal’s vice president of platform engineering operations, Nat Rajesh Natarajan, the company aids several cloud environments and does not have any plans to dispose of its VMware software. Natarajan said: “We’re not interested in a 'rip and replace' approach. In fact, this collaboration will help us utilize robust virtualization technologies such as VMware. They are a valued PayPal partner, and we intend to continue leveraging their core strengths in our cutting edge cloud environment.”
PayPal has not made any comment on the situation on its own website, and has not clarified any statements made by Natarajan.
The co-founder and executive vice president of OpenStack systems integrator Mirantic, Boris Renski, last week commented that his company is communicating with PayPal and eBay on a venture that may possibly result in the replacement of VMware with OpenStack on some 80,000 servers.
Renski said that PayPal is expecting to replace VMware with OpenStack this summer, on around 10,000 of its servers, although it is unclear if eBay and PayPal are cancelling the use of VMware’s hypervisor completely. OpenStack is a set of cloud infrastructure-as-a-service tools, and does not maintain its own hypervisor; it works in conjunction with VMware’s vSphere in addition to Xen, Hyper-V and KVM, amongst others.
VMware last year joined the OpenStack Foundation, following its purchase of its network virtualization startup Nicira, which is one of its key drivers in the project.
In 2012, a lot of time was spent by VMware on updating its management and orchestration portfolio, particularly in terms of managing other vendors’ infrastructure. Last July, it purchased DynamicOps, which deals with the arrangement and organisation of apps and services over heterogenous cloud infrastructure. Last October, the revamped vCloud Suite 5.1 was released by DynamicOps. (CY)Link