Businesses considering building a private cloud with open source tools have likely explored at least one of the big three open IaaS options: OpenStack, CloudStack and Eucalyptus. These are great platforms for IT departments that have the time and technical expertise to test and deploy large clouds.
But what works for enterprise customers isn’t necessarily ideal for small to medium-size businesses or academic institutions with less demand for computing resources and a small IT staff, says Lance Albertson, associate director of operations at Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab.