CSCS, part of Switzerland’s ETH domain of research organizations, receives government funding and must spend it wisely. “We could spend more money on VMware or on developing new technology,” Conciatore said. The organization chose the latter.
CSCS Associate Director Dr. Maria Grazia Giuffreda told the SUSEcon audience that the shift has freed up engineering capacity. “Because of SUSE Virtualization, we reduced the amount of time managing infrastructure by 70%,” she said. “You are freeing the time of very excellent engineers to take on new challenges rather than routine and boring work.”
Conciatore noted, however, that CSCS didn’t abandon VMware. “We’re not leaving completely,” he said. “The main thing is, we didn’t expand VMware in the last few years, and started buying alternatives.”
The bigger picture
For enterprises still weighing their options, the decision may come down to how deeply they are embedded in the VMware network, Nadkarni said. “It’s not just VMware, but the whole ecosystem of tools tied into the VMware way of doing things. That’s what Broadcom is exploiting.”
CSCS had an advantage, Conciatore said: Its automation treated physical and virtual machines the same way, making it easier to decouple. Not every enterprise will have that flexibility.
“SUSE is pushing this as a VMware alternative because they have something that works,” he said. “Currently, the fact that we are not vendor-locked is very important.”
