PayPal’s ‘rip and replace’ of VMware for OpenStack much ado about nothing

For the past week, a story reported on Business Insider and other publications has caused quite a stir with its statements that PayPal — and perhaps even its parent company eBay — is “ditching” VMware in favor of OpenStack. Some media outlets reported that 80,000 servers at PayPal were getting an overhaul with OpenStack technology rather than remaining with VMware.

But since the initial story broke, we’ve seen some backpedaling on those earlier claims. PayPal representatives are supposedly now saying the company has no intention of “replacing” its VMware software with OpenStack technology. It’s also been pointed out that PayPal doesn’t even have 80,000 virtualized servers to migrate. Now, according to Business Insider, the original claims from Mirantis, the consultancy company involved in this “migration project,” have been downplayed by that company’s CEO. What’s really going on?

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In the original news item there was an underlying assumption that VMware and OpenStack do the same things. The story made it sound as if a customer, in this case PayPal, could choose one technology over the other. Is that really the case?

In fact, PayPal could adopt OpenStack for its cloud technology rather than using VMware’s vCloud. In doing so, it could still make use of VMware’s virtualization flagship product, the ESX hypervisor software. OpenStack doesn’t have its own hypervisor but instead works with a number of hypervisor technologies such as Xen, KVM, Microsoft Hyper-V, and yes, VMware vSphere. VMware made sure its ESX workloads would continue to operate within an OpenStack cloud environment well into the future by joining and becoming a board member of the OpenStack Foundation last fall.

In a VMware company blog post last Wednesday, VMware’s senior vice president of cloud infrastructure, Bogomil Balkansky, did his best impression of a Jedi knight trying to convince readers that this story did not contain “the droids we were looking for” and we should all be allowed to “move along” and go about our normal business. In trying to take away some of the initial sting and downplay the original story, Balkansky stated, “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.”

VMware further weighed in against the original news item by publishing a quote from Nat Rajesh Natarajan, VP of Platform Engineering & Operations at PayPal:

PayPal is focused on delivering agile platforms that seamlessly scale across multiple cloud environments. Our initiative with OpenStack is intended to enable agility, innovation and choice. 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.

Balkansky went on: “Yes, PayPal has given us permission to post Nat’s words. We’d never speak on their behalf… this is their story to tell.”

But PayPal has yet to address this story on its own real estate. I suppose in a way, we’re still waiting for PayPal to really “tell this story” itself.

In the VMware blog post, Balkansky reiterates his company’s commitment to supporting heterogeneous cloud environments, like the one at PayPal, which feature a range of products from multiple providers:

To serve our customers, VMware has made important decisions. We support heterogeneous cloud environments–this is the reality of most of our customers’ environments, and they need to manage and automate this complexity quickly and efficiently. This means we engage across a rich ecosystem of vendors and open-source solutions to give our customers the choice and flexibility they need to empower their people and their organizations. To be clear, customers don’t want their vendors at war, they want them focused on their success.

Is this original story really much ado about nothing?

It may come as little surprise that the original source on this story was Boris Renski, co-founder and executive vice president at Mirantis, the OpenStack consultancy company that worked with PayPal on this project. Renski also serves on the board of directors at the OpenStack Foundation, and he was very outspoken against VMware’s participation in the OpenStack community and publicly expressed his concerns and skepticism about VMware’s joining the foundation.

Business Insider updated its original article with a comment from the CEO of Mirantis, Adrian Ionel, who said that Renski was “exaggerating the use case” of OpenStack at PayPal and that Renski’s “knowledge of the project is second hand and therefore limited.”

Clearly, this story has taken a number of twists and turns in little more than a week. Only time will tell what PayPal and eBay’s true intentions will be when it comes to the hybrid cloud, but one thing is clear: It is definitely too early to tell who will be declared the winner and loser in this new cloud era.

In the meantime, VMware has answered the heterogeneous cloud call by spending much of the last 12 months revamping its management portfolio. The virtualization giant has swallowed its pride and made moves to manage competing hypervisor platforms, and it has made acquisitions such as DynamicOps to handle provisioning and orchestration across a heterogeneous cloud infrastructure. It’s also acquired Nicira to give the company a key technology in the network virtualization space and ownership of the lead code contributor to the OpenFlow and software-defined networking OpenStack project.

This article, “PayPal’s ‘rip and replace’ of VMware for OpenStack much ado about nothing,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.