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brandon_butler
Senior Editor

Volkswagen chooses OpenStack for private cloud

News
Apr 06, 20163 mins
Cloud ComputingOpen Source

Inside VW’s big bet on an open source private cloud

The second largest car manufacturer in the world, Volkswagen Group, will use the open-source cloud computing platform OpenStack to build a private cloud that will host websites for its brands VW, Audi and Porsche, and be a platform for innovating automotive technology, the company announced today.

+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Mirantis beats out Red Hat for big VW OpenStack deal | Jeff Bezos to shareholders: At 10 years old, AWS is bigger than Amazon was and growing faster +

For the past two years VW officials at the company’s Wolfsburg, Germany, headquarters debated what platform to use. VW decided to first build a private cloud based on OpenStack that will eventually span thousands of physical nodes across multiple data centers in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Eventually VW hopes to incorporate public cloud resources to create a hybrid cloud, said officials with VW’s consultant, Mirantis.

When fully built out VW’s private cloud could be one of the top five or 10 largest OpenStack-based clouds in production, said Mirantis co-founder and chief marketing officer Boris Renski. According to the OpenStack Foundation’s user survey in October 2015, only 7% of OpenStack production deployments surpassed 1,000 nodes. Only 2% of OpenStack deployments were in the industrial/manufacturing industry.

“The Group IT Cloud is a new way to deliver Volkswagen applications at any scale, in a single global network, consistent across VW brands,” wrote Mario Mueller, Corporate Director IT Operational Services & Infrastructure Technologies, Volkswagen Group in an email interview. “Over time, all net new applications will run on this cloud which will naturally replace most of the legacy systems.” 

It’s built entirely atop x86 hardware, using a Red Hat operating system and the Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor (95% of OpenStack production clouds use KVM, OpenStack’s user survey shows) with Mirantis’ licensed OpenStack distribution provisioning the virtual machines. VW officials said they’re using OpenStack’s Nuetron/OVS/VXLan technology for networking and Ceph for storage, with others likely to be added. Renski said VW is in the midst of choosing a platform as a service (PaaS) layer to act as an application development and hosting environment that would run on top of the OpenStack IaaS.

In the final stages of the vendor vetting process, VW officials conducted an evaluation assessment across 64 use cases before choosing Mirantis, which bases its software entirely off of code from the open source project. Mirantis packages the open source components into a product bundle to ease installation and management and provides 24/7 help desk support, basic triage of bugs plus continuous updates and patches of the software.

“Cost savings will derive from the flexibility not being reliant on single vendors any more,” Mueller wrote. Though the project was not done with cost savings being a primary consideration. Renski said VW will use the platform to help produce cutting-edge technology, like self-driving car applications. “Far more important is VW’s new agility to develop applications and the faster time to market since VW is transforming from a ‘product to services’ company,” Mueller wrote.

brandon_butler
Senior Editor

Senior Editor Brandon Butler covers the cloud computing industry for Network World by focusing on the advancements of major players in the industry, tracking end user deployments and keeping tabs on the hottest new startups. He contributes to NetworkWorld.com and is the author of the Cloud Chronicles blog. Before starting at Network World in January 2012, he worked for a daily newspaper in Massachusetts and the Worcester Business Journal, where he was a senior reporter and editor of MetroWest 495 Biz. Email him at bbutler@nww.com and follow him on Twitter @BButlerNWW.

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