Government urged to save money by ditching VMware

Open source alternative could work out a third cheaper, according to comparative costings by cloud provider Memset

Ditching VMware and moving to open source alternatives such as Xen could yield the government bumper cost savings, cloud supplier Memset has asserted.

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude spoke recently about how the government could cut a significant proportion of its outlay on proprietary software applications such as Word by switching to open document format alternatives such as Google Docs.

But Memset has carried out a comparative costing between VMware and an open source alternative to showcase the savings the government could also be making on the infrastructure side.

Memset claimed it could deliver a typical large, three-year cloud project for £300,000 using an accredited open source solution, compared with £436,000 for an equivalent VMware-based solution. That's a saving of 31 per cent.

The example it gave covered the cloud costs for a public sector organisation looking to deploy a "typical high-traffic web application" serving content to public citizens across 35 virtual machines.

"With the UK government's £200m spend on Microsoft licensing since 2010 proving to be the headline example of the huge cost of software licences to the UK public sector, we can prove that there are further savings that can be achieved from the infrastructure side of things as well," said Robin Pape, Memset's public sector adviser.

Besides the cost savings, open source can provide better scalability, reliability and security, and can mean vendor lock-in is avoided, Memset said.

"We want to educate and raise awareness of the benefits of open source – but more importantly we want public sector organisations to know that just because they are using VMWare or other proprietary software for their infrastructure, this shouldn't stop them from migrating, and that the cost savings are large enough to consider making the move to an open source alternative like Xen," Pape added.

VMware declined to comment.