The JBGeorge Tech Blog

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For those of you who don’t know, I’m a senior cloud strategist for Dell in our Cloud Solutions group, and I’m also the business / marketing lead for Dell’s OpenStack initiative.

We’ve been incredibly busy working on all things OpenStack, so I wanted to provide a bit of an update on where we’ve been, and where we’re going.

Last summer, Dell was one of a few vendors such as Intel, Citrix, and a few others, that got together and supported the fledgling new OpenStack movement founded by Rackspace and NASA.  

(The ONLY hardware solution provider that had the vision to so I should add.)

Since then, we’ve been active in the community, working with partners, and helpng customers on real OpenStack engagements.

• Dell’s been an integral part of all three OpenStack Design Summits to date – sponsoring portions of the events, leading discussions on architecture and design, providing hardware for install fests, and meeting with partners and customers.
    
• Crowbar anyone?  We’ve led the way in an operational model that starts with bare metal provisioning but provides a methodology for managing your evolving OpenStack instance.
    
• Developed the popular technical whitepaper  “BootStrapping OpenStack Clouds” authored by Dell’s own OpenStack celebrities Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus, as well as contributions from Rackspace OpenStack celebrity Bret Piatt.
    
• Numerous lightning talks, OpenStack / Crowbar demos, and working with a number of partners like Rackspace, Citrix, Opscode, and others in their OpenStack initiatives

It should be clear that Dell’s a believer in what the OpenStack community is doing, and we are committed to being a part of the community, providing expertise where our core competencies are.  It’s been that way since we started back in July of last year.

So what’s the latest?

• Did you know customers have already started working with Dell on getting OpenStack clouds in their environments?  
     
  That’s right – our involvement since the beginning puts us on the short list of community partners that have the most history with OpenStack, so we have a functional reference architecture, Dell developed Crowbar software, and cloud services that can work for customers today.  (Info at the end of this blog entry on how you can learn more about working with Dell to get real live OpenStack clouds in your environment.)
     
  In fact, check out one of our customers, Cybera, publicly blogged about getting OpenStack running on Dell PowerEdge C technology.  (Link to Cybera’s blog at the end of this entry – very deep technical info.)
    
• Dell’s OpenStack Installer, better known to the community as #Crowbar, is coming along nicely!  When we announced the existence of Crowbar earlier this year, we were clear that our intention was to contribute it to the open source community.  We are well on our way there.  We’ve already submitted our blueprint to the OpenStack governance body for Crowbar as a cloud installer (more on that here from Rob Hirschfeld).
    
  And here’s a quick snapshot of our latest work on the Crowbar UI that Rob posted recently. 
    
  (What?  No more plain white background?  That’s right – we’ve got game. 🙂 )
    
  

  Dell Crowbar

     

• The final comment I’ll make is that we see this summer as an important time for OpenStack – Cactus is out, Diablo is around the corner, partners are joining the community daily, and customers are getting excited.  More and more of our customers are finding out HOW REAL OpenStack, and are getting on board.
    
  Dell is going to continue to be a mover and shaker in OpenStack, so keep an eye out on Dell as we prepare to make our next big move in OpenStack.   
    
  Head back here often to stay up to date, and you can also follow myself and other Dell OpenStack leads on Twitter – @jbgeorge, @zehicle, @barton808, and others.
    

Here’s to the summer of OpenStack! 

More info:

• Dell’s OpenStack website (where you can get the “Bootstrapping OpenStack Clouds” technical whitepaper) – http://www.Dell.com/OpenStack
• To talk to someone about becoming a Dell OpenStack customer – OpenStack@Dell.com
• Dell customer Cybera’s blog on “Running OpenStack in Production” – http://www.cybera.ca/tech-radar/running-openstack-production-part-1-hardware
• Dell’s Cloud Evangelist’s blog – www.bartongeorge.net
• Dell’s Cloud Solution Architecht (and OpenStack expert) Rob Hirschfeld’s blog – www.RobHirschfeld.com
    

Until next time,

JOSEPH
@jbgeorge