US Signal’s COO John White said its OpenCloud platform that launched last October is off to a strong start, with a big chunk of its business coming from unhappy VMware customers.

“We probably have 15 migrations going on right this second, and most of those are VMware,” White said

White said about 30% to 40% of the OpenCloud revenue comes through MSPs migrating customers off VMware to OpenCloud ‘s open-source Apache CloudStack that supports virtualization and Kubernetes containers. US Signal asked its MSP Advisory Board members in 2024 what they thought about a cloud based on open-source virtualization, and the MSPs encouraged the infrastructure-as-a-service provider to go for it.

“The [Broadcom VMware] price hike hit them really hard because margins were already tight,” White said. “We said ‘Hey we’ve been working on this open-source thing. Will you be open to it? Are your customers going to care?’ And the MSPs said ‘We don’t care what the technology is. You provide us an SLA, give us performance, just make it happen, whatever the hypervisor it is, whether it’s open source, it doesn’t matter.’ So we designed it for those [MSPs].”

White joined US Signal in 2023 with plenty of cloud experience, including past positions at Expedient, AWS and Myriad360. He said he “got burned” by VMware’s lack of scaling ability in one previous case.

“It was part of my thesis coming into US Signal that I wanted to create something that was truly private cloud,” he said. “In my opinion, VMware is not private cloud, it's virtualization. To get private cloud, you need to have a feature-rich API. You need to have pay-as-you-go models. That's what we built with OpenCloud.”

John White

Supporting a cloud based on open source required a storage system that could perform at a high level, scale up or down easily and had built-in security. White said US Signal already had several storage systems. After extensive testing, the provider expanded its Infinidat footprint rather than its other incumbents Dell, Vast and Pure Storage. US Signal added all-flash Infinidat InfiniBox SSA G4 to its previous Infinidat G3 systems and now has 27PB of Infinidat storage with only two administrators.

“Fleet management side is super simple,” White said. “We’re increasing infra every day and haven’t had to scale employees.”

He said performance was another reason for scaling up his Infinidat storage.

“We have all these migrations coming in with everybody getting rid of VMware, and so it's just beating on the disks 24/7,” White said. “We need to be able to flip a switch and turn them on and get them up and running, and that was one of our bigger concerns on the I/O side of it. And so we haven't been able to choke these [Infinidat systems] at all. And that's been a big win for us.

White said OpenCloud has 60 customers, with more looking to sign up.

NetSource One Adds Open Cloud Flexibility

Saginaw, MI-based NetSource One, No. 457 on the 2025 MSP 501, is an early OpenCloud customer.

“We explored a wide range of virtualization platforms—both on-premises and hosted—with a clear goal in mind: we wanted a solution that was more open and flexible than VMware,” NetSource One CEO Andy Skrzypczak said. “It’s been a smooth transition, and the results have exceeded our expectations.”

White said there are mainly three paths for OpenCloud customers: run Azure in a platform-as-a-service setup, run private cloud (often using Nvidia GPUs and Nutanix in place of VMware) or run multi-tenancy. “A lot of our customers are using all three,” he said. “You need virtual machines,” he said of these migrations. “You need to run containers.”

“We're going to hit these migrations really, really hard. The ramping on it right now is pretty insane. It’s a fun place to be. I’ve never seen this big of a disruption.”