CloudStory.in Exclusive - An Interview with Mario Mueller, VP of Infrastructure at BMW!

CloudStory.in met with Mario Mueller, VP of Infrastructure at BMW and Chairman of Open Data Center Alliance during Forecast 2013 last week. We talked about ODCA’s vision, BMW’s participation, and participation from India etc. Here is the summary.

ODCA and BMW

ODCA envisions interoperable and secure cloud through open, interoperable standards. ODCA works together with cloud service providers to drive up these requirements.

BMW is one of the founding members of ODCA. Their participation is driven out of their own requirements such as resilience, interoperability etc. for their migration in to cloud. Together with other customers who had similar requirements, they founded ODCA in 2010 to drive such requirements up to cloud service providers.ODCA has since then published common usage models and cloud servicing models. It is working with service providers, standards bodies and the industry at large to define and share customer priorities

BMW's Private Cloud Platform

BMW has developed its own Private Cloud platform to satisfy their internal requirements of zero downtime, resiliency, migration and interoperability with legacy software. They've tried to use existing software as much as possible in this implementation. Their virtualization platform is 50% VMWare and 50% Xen.

They are hiring too!

VM Migration

BMW's internal Private Cloud can support live VM migrations within the same data center now. They were able to do multiple times successfully and are confident extending this to multiple zones/ regions.

'Open' in ODCA

Open here means an open community and not necessarily open sourced software. BMW uses a lot of open source software though, given that 50% of their internal private cloud infrastructure is running Linux. Response from other open source projects such as OpenStack has been encouraging.

Participation from India

Despite the incredible talent and people available in India, contribution to ODCA from India has been less. With Infosys joining ODCA as a contributing member, this is expected to increase. Mario was incredibly positive about the quality of talent in India and confident that the participation from India will increase. You can join ODCA here.

CloudStory also requested for special discounts towards ODCA membership fees for startups from India. Please watch this space for updates on the same.