IT pros managing complex business organizations are looking for data center management software that supports multi-cloud orchestration across departments in a vendor agnostic fashion. Many of the available options can be categorized based on open source or proprietary licensing agreements, with enterprise licensing costs for each varied according to the package or distro. OpenStack, CloudStack, & Mesosophere solutions compete with VMware, Microsoft, and other IT majors for enterprise IT market share. Much of the business goes to professional integration companies, contractors, and consultants.

In this article, we’ll compare the market leading private cloud orchestration software for data center management with new multi-cloud solutions.

Private cloud orchestration: Open source vs. proprietary software solutions

OpenStack is the market leader for open source data center management and private cloud orchestration, with many different Linux developers such as SUSE, Ubuntu, and Red Hat all offering enterprise-ready distributions. OpenStack has a wide ecosphere of third-party software development companies as well as IT majors offering niche packages, plugins, and modules to extend the base functionality. OpenStack has surpassed CloudStack as the industry standard, where major introduction of Kubernetes services by Google and AWS has marginalized use of Mesosphere primarily to telecom.

VMware and Microsoft compete with a wide number of start-up software companies in offering proprietary solutions for data center management to enterprise corporations. Many IT departments locked into Microsoft solutions have transitioned to the Azure Cloud platform fueling phenomenal growth. There is still some debate between the security of public cloud solutions vs. private cloud data centers, leading many corporations to adopt multi-cloud solutions and retaining private servers.

Public cloud vendors: Main platforms & services for enterprise corporations

The main value of public cloud service providers is their scale, which extends to include racks of web servers greater than the combined data center resources of millions of companies. Enterprise corporations can outsource the majority of their private cloud hardware to public cloud platforms and save money on continual upgrades, talent, software licensing, web security, and maintenance. When corporate security requires on-site hardware, IT pros need to develop multi-cloud solutions that operate together with remote solutions. DevOps often requires use of hardware across multiple service vendors.

Multi-cloud resource management: Integrated administration of hardware

Companies seeking multi-cloud solutions can adopt proprietary solutions using software from the IT majors or look for new products in the start-up ecosystem. Mirantis, Nutanix, Cloud Foundry, and NetApp are some of the most complex third-party software solutions available for enterprise multi-cloud orchestration. The Mirantis Cloud Platform (MCP) will enable multi-cloud orchestration with Kubernetes support for elastic scalability, load balancing, and resource automation across public cloud hardware resources agnostically with built in support for AWS, GCP, Azure, VMware, etc.

Nutanix data center management software is designed to support hyperconverged hardware for enterprise corporations. Hyperconverged infrastructure utilizes virtualization to configure isolated VM or container instances across available hardware resources with multi-cloud and on-prem management capabilities. NetApp cloud solutions can be used to improve the software development lifecycle using Kubernetes orchestration in multi-cloud constructs across multiple vendors and platforms. Cloud Foundry is used by 61% of large enterprise corporations and 25% of SMEs for multi-cloud management.

Hybrid cloud: Unique solutions for every workplace environment

Where multi-cloud describes the contemporary implementation of IT departments in large enterprise corporations, managing in-house servers with public cloud resources from multiple service providers and SaaS platforms, hybrid cloud illustrates how each of these deployments is unique to the workplace environment and technical requirements of every business organization. What IT pros need is a “single plane of glass” configuration and administration console for multi-cloud data center management.

Enterprise IT departments can choose between the software solutions developed by market leading companies like VMware and Microsoft for multi-cloud orchestration or choose an open source platform like OpenStack or Mesosphere for private cloud deployment.

Since on-prem private cloud hardware is talent-intensive to deploy, many companies are seeking out public cloud alternatives based on Kubernetes. For elite DevOps performance, consider multi-cloud software products from Mirantis, Nutanix, Cloud Foundry, and NetApp for custom building complex enterprise solutions.