Survey: Scalability, Cost Savings Drives Open Source Cloud Adoption 
More than 80% of IT professionals polled by a group of open source providers of cloud computing solutions are using, or plan to implement, a cloud project. Top cloud motivators were: cutting hardware costs, more agile infrastructure and reducing system management burdens, according to the survey by Cloud.com and partners.
Cloud.com, a provider of open source cloud computing software, and its partners Zenoss and BitNami, have released the results of a cloud computing survey conducted to determine the key IT objectives and inhibitors for cloud adoption.
The survey polled community members from popular open source cloud projects, including BitNami, CloudStack and Zenoss Core. Of the 500 respondents, 40% were CTOs, architects and IT managers from commercial firms, government and educational institutions.
The survey found many organizations are using open source software and many prefer deploying virtualized infrastructure on dedicated data center resources, the survey found.
In terms of number, the vast majority of respondents have (or expect to have) a cloud computing project in the near future. In specific, some 20% of respondents said they already have cloud implementations. Beyond that, an additional 61% said they were involved in a cloud project (having approved a project, planning to implement a cloud strategy or gathering data.)
Only 20% said they were not planning to implement cloud computing at this time.
The Number One reason cited for adopting cloud computing was reducing hardware costs 68%), followed by faster deployment of infrastructure (66%) and reducing systems management burden (57%)
Other highlights of the cloud computing survey include:
- 71% of the CTOs surveyed said scalability was the most popular reason for adopting cloud computing; 61% cited elasticity or the need to adjust to the fluctuations in resource demand
- 69% of the respondents said* they were using open source software as much as possible and only 3% said they were not using any open source software at all
- 83% percent of IT pros said they planned to deploy Linux as a guest operating system; and 66% said they will be deploying Windows OSes in the cloud;
- 57% of people surveyed said they preferred to host their infrastructures on their own hardware; and,
- 36% of respondents indicated they preferred to run their infrastructure virtually but hosted on dedicated hardware at a managed data center.
“The survey findings help identify the needs of organizations and their preferences for deploying virtual infrastructure so we can develop solutions that best suit the needs of cloud computing users,” Mark Hinkle, Cloud.com’s vice president of community said in a statement.”
