PayPal is moving its 15,000 nodes off on VMware, the proprietary cloud platform, to the relatively unstable OpenStack, the anti-Amazon open source cloud platform backed by IBM, HP, Dell, Red Hat and Rackspace.

If the migration is successful, then eBay, PayPal’s parent company, is likely to follow suit and move its 65,000 physical nodes to OpenStack, retaining some sort of VMware reserve if VMware is lucky.

The news hit Monday when Mirantis, the OpenStack consulting company backed by Intel and Dell and said to be the largest OpenStack integrator around, open sourced FUEL, its internal automation tool used by PayPal, WebEx, NASA and the Gap to ease their large OpenStack migrations.


The OpenStack Foundation was the proud Diamond Sponsor of 11th Cloud Expo (2012)

The widgetry, a collection of verified Python and Cobbler deployment scripts and configuration and deployment libraries, has just been released under the Apache 2.0 license and is free for anybody to use.

Mirantis is hoping to get some paid consulting work out what it calls its “secret sauce.”

PayPal, an OpenStack supporter, has reportedly started with 10,000 servers that’ll go live on OpenStack this summer according to Business Insider, which says to think of it like the old Linux versus Windows war.

Mirantis co-founder Boris Renski told GigaOm that PayPal has “a very large VMware vSphere footprint but, at this point, they want to go beyond just vSphere virtualization and implement orchestration – [they want] agile, cloud infrastructure to accelerate their time-to-production cycle on new apps and web site features and they want to standardize across the board.”

OpenStack offers no vendor lock-in and the potential use of multiple clouds so users can switch if one fails.

Gartner calculates that the enterprise will spend $80 billion on cloud computing by 2016.

PayPal said in a statement that it fancies OpenStack because of the customization it allows. Its FUEL-based migration isn’t finished and

Mirantis admits it may not succeed in moving all of PayPal’s thousands of instances and its various production workloads.

If it does VMware could be toast as far as PayPal is concerned.

PayPal’s senor director of platform engineering and operations Saran Mandair said in a carefully couched statement that PenPal’s “OpenStack project uses the FUEL library by Mirantis, which has dramatically accelerated our OpenStack deployment with robust production-grade architecture, while giving us the flexibility to tailor OpenStack to our needs.”

FUEL can be used to deploy customizable third-party OpenStack deployments such Canonical and Red Hat’s and can reportedly plug into any existing infrastructure.

Mirantis offers an SLA. Users will have to pay for updates. If the widgetry works Mirantis could become a de facto standard. Currently vendor-neutral, users could become addicted enough to make them dependent on Mirantis’ updates.

By the way, VMware recently up and joined the OpenStack Foundation.

See https://fuel.mirantis.com.