Our story that PayPal was rolling out OpenStack, a new, hot cloud-computing operating system, with eventual plans for PayPal and its parent company, eBay, to rip out VMware software from tens of thousands of servers caused quite a stir.
That's because a big cloud computing company can act as a role model for other enterprises.
We heard from sources that the story sparked panicked, angry phone calls between top executives at VMware, eBay, and Mirantis, the cloud-computing company that helps companies install OpenStack, which told us about the project.
On Wednesday, VMware's senior vice president, Bogomil Balkansky, published a blog post that quoted a PayPal executive promising that PayPal wouldn't entirely ditch VMware.
Here's what Nat Rajesh Natarajan, VP of platform engineering and operations at PayPal, told VMware:
Our initiative with OpenStack is intended to enable agility, innovation and choice. We’re not interested in a “rip and replace’ approach. In fact, this collaboration will help us utilize robust virtualization technologies such as VMware. They are a valued PayPal partner, and we intend to continue leveraging their core strengths in our cutting edge cloud environment.
That's not what PayPal told Business Insider. A PayPal spokesperson said in an email that the company had adopted some OpenStack software, but still had some VMware software in place.
PayPal can opt for OpenStack for its cloud, instead of VMware's vCloud, and still use VMware's main product, its "hypervisor" software, which allows servers to run multiple types of software, including operating systems, at once. OpenStack works with a bunch of hypervisors.
PayPal told us it also uses Red Hat technology. Red Hat has a hypervisor, too, called KVM. KVM works with OpenStack, too.
As we previously reported, most enterprises are not looking to ditch VMware's hypervisor to save money because they like how reliably it works. But low-cost alternatives to its hypervisor, such as KVM, or even Microsoft's Hyper-V, abound.
They'll be watching the big vendors like PayPal to see how they build their clouds and which technologies they use.
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