The JBGeorge Tech Blog

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Recently, Cybera, a non-profit Canadian outfit who’s core objective is to drive innovation among Canada’s tech community, recently blogged about their path to production, open source cloud instance based on OpenStack, with their first installment being on the topic of hardware. 

Dell and Rackspace were fortunate to be called out as innovators in helping them on the path to the OpenStack cloud.

Here’s a quick excerpt on their server hardware choices:

We ordered four different types of servers (aka nodes). A management node (nova-api, nova-network, nova-scheduler, nova-objectstore), compute nodes (nova-compute, nova-volume), a proxy node (swift-proxy-server) and storage nodes (swift-object-*, swift-container-*, swift-account-*). All nodes were contained in the Dell C6100 chassis. Here are the specs:

	Processor	Sockets	Cores	Threads	RAM	Disk
Management	E5620	2	8	16	24	8 x 300 GB
Compute	X5650	2	12	24	96	6 x 500 GB
Proxy	E5620	2	8	16	24	4 x 300 GB
Storage	E5620	2	8	16	24	6 x 2 TB

The disk on the compute nodes is used for VMs and volumes, which is to say:

• a portion can be used for VM instances, the files that back the VMs
• a portion can be used for volumes, the files that back the virtual hard disks for the VMs (technically speaking it’s logical volumes that back the virtual hard disks but you can think of them as files). See Managing Volumes.

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It’s a great read, and I highly recommend anyone even remotely considering OpenStack to take a look, and follow them as they continue to provide the community updates on their journey.  (The link to Cybera’s post is available at the end of this blog entry.)

As Dell announced a few months ago, we’re actively engaging telcos, hosters, service providers and others on getting them going on OpenStack today.   We have OpenStack experts on staff developing product, working with the community, and driving innovative design – you probably recognize some of the names – Rob Hirschfeld, Greg Althaus, and a few others. 

And we’re proud to say that Dell was the ONLY hardware solutions provider to have been part of the community since its creation in July 2010.

To date, we’ve

• Authored the wildly popular “Bootstrapping OpenStack Clouds” technical whitepaper, which details hyperscale design for multi-node OpenStack clouds
    
• Developed the as popular OpenStack tool, Crowbar, which deploys a MULTI-NODE OpenStack cloud in a matter of minutes rather than hours (yes, that “MULTI-NODE” differentiation is important).  It also allows for certain infrastructure configuration, network discovery, and is the basis for the operational model we feel will be optimal for OpenStack management.  
    
• Defined a reference architecture for OpenStack on Dell PowerEdge C cloud optimized servers
    
• Been developing relationships with a number of valued partners in the OpenStack community, such as Rackspace Cloud Builders, Citrix, Opscode and others, as we continue to get customers to a full OpenStack cloud.
    

If you’re looking to start on the path that Cybera has gone down with OpenStack as a cloud platform, we’d love to talk to you.  Reach out to us at OpenStack@Dell.com.

And stay tuned – the best is yet to come. 🙂

More info:

• Cybera’s blog – http://www.cybera.ca/tech-radar/running-openstack-production-part-1-hardware
• Dell’s OpenStack website (including link to “Bootstrapping OpenStack Clouds” whitepaper) – http://www.Dell.com/OpenStack
• Video on Dell’s Crowbar tool – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgT-6G2fXA
• Rob Hirschfeld’s blog – http://www.robhirschfeld.com/

  
Until next time,

JBGeorge
@jbgeorge