PayPal pledges support to VMware over OpenStack claims

A man holding a laptop interacting with a rack of servers

published 27 March 2013

Online payment provider PayPal has stressed that VMware still has a role to play in its IT infrastructure, following reports that it plans to pull the software from 80,000 of its servers.

PayPal is planning to replace VMware with an open source alternative from OpenStack across thousands of its servers, according to a report on Business Insider recently.

OpenStack is essentially a coalition of tech vendors and developers from across the world who have pooled resources to create open source software that can be used to build private and public clouds.

The article quotes Boris Renski, an OpenStack Foundation board member, who claimed his consultancy firm Mirantis is working with PayPal on the server software swap.

To begin with, PayPal will start removing VMware's software from 10,000 servers that are set to go live this summer, he claimed.

"The grand vision for the project is, over time, they will replace all of the virtual infrastructure with OpenStack, not just PayPal, but PayPal and eBay together," Renski said.

However, Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel has since played down his comments, claiming Renski has "exaggerated the use case" of OpenStack at PayPal and that his knowledge of the work being done there is "limited" and "second hand".

In a statement to IT Pro, a PayPal spokesperson reiterated its commitment to the VMware brand.

"VMware provides important technologies for PayPal's platform. However, we do leverage a few cloud technologies, including OpenStack, VMware and Red Hat so that we can architect our infrastructure to enable choice and deliver agility for our business," the company statement read.

IT Pro contacted VMware for comment on this story and was still awaiting a response at the time of publication.

Caroline Donnelly is the news and analysis editor of IT Pro and its sister site Cloud Pro, and covers general news, as well as the storage, security, public sector, cloud and Microsoft beats. Caroline has been a member of the IT Pro/Cloud Pro team since March 2012, and has previously worked as a reporter at several B2B publications, including UK channel magazine CRN, and as features writer for local weekly newspaper, The Slough and Windsor Observer. She studied Medical Biochemistry at the University of Leicester and completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Magazine Journalism at PMA Training in 2006.