[PLUG] Open Source Alternative to OnApp

[John Von Essen <john@quonix.net>]

So I recently demo’d OnApp for full suite cloud services mgmt (i.e. end user GUI for building/booting/rebooting/console/etc), in particular I was interested in the software designed storage (SDS) aspect where you build a distributed SAN across your compute nodes, so each compute node has a decent number of SSDs, and a dedicated 10G NIC for storage.

The product is very nice, but its prohibitively expensive, the per core licensing makes it impossible to really make any money from it at an ISP/MSP level especially if you are trying to price your VMs competitively.

I know there are open source alternatives that give you the end user GUI features, but do any of them offer the software defined storage capability?

If I cant find that, the alternative is to just go back to the normal model of a separate iSCSI SAN (built on commodity hardware). Technically at large enough scale and proper planning this model might be on-par with the SDS model, though the SDS gets you more redundancy and maybe more IOPS. But the SDS is much better for a small build out of the gate.

-John


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