Broadcom loses another big VMware customer: UK fintech cloud Beeks Group, and most of its 20,000 VMs
Broadcom has lost another significant customer after UK-based cloud operator Beeks Group decided to adopt the open source OpenNebula stack.
Beeks offers virtual private servers and bare metal boxes for financial services providers and emphasizes low latency for both – and for the trading network it operates.
The biz told The Register it operates in over 20 datacenters and runs a fleet of 20,000-plus virtual machines and more than 3,000 bare metal servers. Most of the VMs now run under OpenNebula – an open source project that provides hybrid cloud features on multiple hypervisors but favors KVM.
Beeks head of production management Matthew Cretney told us it moved from VMware due to several factors. A bill from Broadcom for ten times the sum it previously paid for software licenses was one of them. Beeks's customers also told it that VMware was no longer seen as essential infrastructure.
A symptom of perceived innovation woes was that Beeks felt VMware's suite had a substantial management overhead – that meant too much of its server fleet was dedicated to managing VMs, not running them for clients.
