Warren Buffett’s favorite insurer GEICO drops VMware for OpenStack US auto insurer GEICO has decided to migrate from VMware to OpenStack. Tad Van Fleet, a distinguished architect at GEICO, said "OpenStack allows us to avoid vendor lock-in and allows us to customize our infrastructure to meet our specific needs. We can integrate various open source tools and platforms, which is something we …
Tad Van Fleet can never be accused of being work shy or sitting on his laurels... he even mentioned ceph :) amazing tech for the brave and clever with the balls and intelligence to implement it well
Guy seems quite happy to make sure he works for every penny he gets paid .... and he'll be on a lota lotta pennies for sure
Good luck to him, but probably will be ok as people like him usually attract "the best" to work with/under them
I suspect that in the not too distant future, VMware will be spun/sold off just like what happened with Motorola after Google acquired it.
I highly doubt it'll ever get back to mass acceptance though; the well has well and truly been poisoned and is now glowing fluorescent green.
Broadcom is indeed preparing to dump the consumer and lower-end offerings in the hope of keeping large customers happy with something that is cheaper and easier than moving everything to Microsoft.
Anyone who has more than a couple of VMs should definitely be assessing the alternatives before that bill with the massive increase in licence costs arrives.
While I agree that VMware is now, in a manner of speaking, on the economic death row I'll admit that a proposal to migrate from VMware to, of all the hypervisor stacks out there, OpenStack, made me raise an eyebrow. I'm involved in a project that uses OpenStack, as provided by our Computing Centre, on a moderate scale (approx. 100 instances) and we have had, time and again, and continue to have problems with instances failing, sometimes in bizzare ways (and don't get me started on what we've often had to go through after an OStack major release upgrade). Which is *mostly* acceptable for our use case, as the vast majority of those instances is made up of cattle servers the images for which are provisioned with Kickstart and Ansible. If one fails, you just delete it and have your infrastructure script create a new one, and even losing the image is not much of a problem. Still, I'm in the process of setting up a "vanilla" KVM server for hosting a few mission-critical VMs that keep failing on OStack every now and then, which has become a major annoyance. (Those hosts, too, are provisioned with Ansible and easy to re-create, but you still don't want an important service to slow down, freeze or lose its network connectivity for no apparent reason every so often.) And I know that we are not alone with the "OpenStack for cattle, something else for the pets"-approach.
It is possible that GEICO's IT department has truely superior OStack skills or at least good hope to acquire them "on the job"; or maybe they are in the process of re-factoring their IT systems to somehow run on redundant, expendable cattle servers exclusively, though I figure that might be hard for an insurance company (but then, what do I know about that particular trade). Or maybe their mission critical systems have been running on physical silicon all the time and they were basically mis-using VMware to host their cattle and are now correcting that mistake. Or maybe they have some other ace up their sleeve, so devilishly clever that I cannot possibly imagine what it might be. But otherwise I'd say "I whish you the best of luck", especially on OStack major upgrades.
Geico isn't the first and wont be the last. VMware is a dead product now, you can't justify expending any serious investment into it, either time or money as in a few years it'll be old technology with most of the R&D staff let go, and the price will be increasing rapidly.
OpenStack is a fantastic tool, or set of tools, if you have the staff numbers and deep skills to make it work. I'd love to use it but we're too small and don't have the advanced skills needed. Wouldn't mind working for Geico though, the next few years is going to be exciting from a tech perspective.
Wow talk about america and their cult of personalities for rich people. Just look how worshipping the biggest aresholes in america has worked out.
- Biggest gun crime in the western world.
- Lowest holiday rights in the western world
- Lowest paid maternity periods in the entire world. Even Ethiopia and many other african shitholes have paid maternity leave.
- Tens of millions of workers working 3 jobs and 80 hours until they die...
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