Archive
Purpose-Built Solutions Make a Big Difference In Extracting Data Insights: HP ProLiant SL4500
This is a duplicate of the blog I’ve authored on the HP blog site at http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Hyperscale-Computing-Blog/Purpose-Built-Solutions-Make-a-Big-Difference-In-Extracting-Data/ba-p/173222#.VEUdYrEo70c
Indulge me as I flash back to the summer of 2012 at the Aquatics Center in London, England – it’s the Summer Olympics, where some of the world’s top swimmers, representing a host of nations, are about to kick off the Men’s 100m Freestyle swimming competition. The starter gun fires, and the athletes give it their all in a heated head to head match for the gold.
And the results of the race are astounding: USA’s Nathan Adrian took the gold medal with a time of 47.52 seconds, with Australia’s James Magnussen finishing a mere 0.01 seconds later to claim the silver medal! It was an incredible display of competition, and a real testament to power of the human spirit.
For an event demanding such precise timing, we can only assume that very sensitive and highly calibrated measuring devices were used to capture accurate results. And it’s a good thing they did – fractions of a second separated first and second place.
Now, you and I have both measured time before – we’ve checked our watches to see how long it has been since the workday started, we’ve used our cell phones to see how long we’ve been on the phone, and so on. It got the job done. Surely the Olympic judges at the 2012 Men’s 100m Freestyle had some of these less precise options available – why didn’t they just simply huddle around one of their wrist watches to determine the winner of the gold, silver and bronze?
OK, I am clearly taking this analogy to a silly extent to make a point.
When you get serious about something, you have to step up your game and secure the tools you need to ensure the job gets done properly.
There is a real science behind using purpose-built tools to solve complex challenges, and the same is true with IT challenges, such as those addressed with big data / scale out storage. There are a variety of infrastructure options to deal with the staggering amounts of data, but there are very few purpose built server solutions like HP’s ProLiant SL4500 product – a server solution built SPECIFCIALLY for big data and scale out storage.
The HP ProLiant SL4500 was built to handle your data. Period.
- It provides an unprecedented drive capacity with over THREE PB in a single rack
- It delivers scalable performance across multiple drive technologies like SSD, SAS or SATA
- It provides significant energy savings with shared cooling and power and reduced complexity with fewer cables
- It offers flexible configurations •A 1-node, 60 large form factor drive configuration, perfect for large scale object storage with software vendors like Cleversafe and Scality, or with open source projects like OpenStack Swift and Ceph
- A 2-node, 25 drive per node configuration, ideal for running Microsoft Exchange
- A 3-node, 15 drive per node configuration, optimal for running Hadoop and analytics applications
If you’re serious about big data and scale out storage, it’s time to considering stepping up your game with the SL4500. Purpose-built makes a difference, and the SL4500 was purpose-built to help you make sense of your data.
You can learn more about the SL4500 by talking to your HP rep or by visiting us online at HP ProLiant SL4500 Scalable Systems or at Object Storage Software for ProLiant.
And if you’re here at Hadoop World this week, come on by the HP booth – we’d love to chat about how we can help solve your data challenges with SL4500 based solutions.
Until next time,
Joseph George
NOW AVAILABLE: The Dell Red Hat Cloud Solution, powered by RHEL OpenStack Platform!
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This is a duplicate of a blog I posted on del.ly/60119gex.
This week, those of us on the OpenStack and Red Hat OpenStack teams are partying like its 1999! (For those of you who don’t get that reference, read this first.)
Let me provide some context…
In 1999, when Linux was still in the early days of being adopted broadly by the enterprise (similar to an open source cloud project we all know), Dell and Red Hat joined forces to bring the power of Linux to the mainstream enterprise space.
Fast forward to today, and we see some interesting facts:
- Red Hat has become the world’s first billion dollar open source company
- 1 out of every 5 servers sold annually runs Linux
- Enterprise’s view of open source is far more receptive than in the past
So today – Dell and Red Hat are doing it again: this time with OpenStack.
Today, we announce the availability of the Dell Red Hat Cloud Solution, Powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform – a hardware + software + services solution focused on enabling the broader mainstream market with the ability to run and operate OpenStack backed by Dell and Red Hat. This is a hardened architecture, a validated distribution of OpenStack, additional software, and services / support to get you going and keep you going, and lets you:
- Accelerate your time to value with jointly engineered open, flexible components and purpose engineered configurations to maximize choice and eliminate lock-in
- Expand on your own terms with open, modular architectures and stable OpenStack technologies that can scale out to meet your evolving IT and business needs
- Embrace agility with open compute, storage, and networking technologies to transform your application development, delivery, and management
- Provide leadership to your organization with new agile, open IT services capable of massive scalability to meet dynamic business demands
Here is one more data point to consider – Dell’s IT organization is using the RHEL OpenStack Platform as a foundational element for incubating new technologies with a self-service cloud infrastructure. Now, that is pretty strong statement about how an OpenStack cloud can help IT drive innovation in a global scale organization.
At the end of the day, both Dell and Red Hat are committed to getting OpenStack to the enterprise with the right level of certification, validation, training, and support.
We’ve done it before with RHEL, and we’re going to do it again with OpenStack.
Until next time,
JOSEPH
@jbgeorge
Day 2: Big Data Innovation Summit 2014 #DataWest14
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Hello again big data fans – from where I’ve learned the San Francisco 49’ers will be playing their 2014 NFL season at Levi’s Stadium… Santa Clara!
(BTW, the stadium – from what I could see – is beautiful! I’m a big NFL fan, and there’s now another reason to come to the San Jose area, other than all the cloud / big data conferences.)
Got a lot of great feedback on yesterday’s “Day 1” post of the summit, so here are some observations from the final day of the conference.
- Yahoo’s Duru Ahanotu spoke through driving efficiency in how data teams are organized, going through the permutations of generalists vs specialists and centralized vs de-centralized, and how to best address teams in each model.
. - PayPal’s Moises Nascimento (who is a very captivating speaker) drove the point home, that though we are now adopting many of the new data technologies like Hadoop and NoSQL, most of our existing data sources and toolsets still provide value – so there is value in leveraging ALL data sources.
. - Moises also made a point of highlighting that data manipulation is best handled at the SYSTEM level, while data analysis is better managed at the ENTERPRISE level
. - In HP’s discussion, they introduced the concept of the GEOBYTE – 10^30 bytes, a size of data that the human race is expected to hit in the next few years.
To provide context on the magnitude of a GEOBYTE (10^30 bytes), there is estimated to only be 10^19 GRAINS OF SAND ON THE EARTH. Think about that for a second.
- The team also highlighted their view on “Big BI” vs “Big Data”
- Big BI – same types of analysis but on more data; more batch processing; results that were not easily actionable
- Big Data – joining datasets that have not been previously joined, near real time analysis, action oriented results
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- I thought Ancestry.com had one of the best sessions of the event, as they went deep into the GERMLINE algorithm that was the foundation of their business technology, and how they had to create jermline (now with a “j”) based on Hadoop / HDFS to create a SCALABLE matching engine. As we all know, SCALE matters. The performance and speed benchmarks between the “G” project and the “j” project were mindblowing.
. - Finally, sat in on the Netflix session – in addition to being a big fan of Netflix, as both a consumer and a tech observer, I’ve always been impressed with the way Netflix has evolved their business, and continues to do so. In this session, they went into great detail on their use of the Amazon cloud services, and their open source projects as a layer above to enhance functionality and deploy features. Topics touched on included red / black deployment to allow ease of features into production, and the importance of graceful degradation, so that a failure can be less of a catastrophic event for the end user.
.- One very telling statement is really a commentary on the value of use and participation in the open source process – Netflix was clear that they see value in being an open source contributor / leader is that it preserves the future of their systems – rather than sitting back and letting the industry decide their direction with tools and tech, Netflix uses open source to help drive and lead the industry to where they see value.
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- One very telling statement is really a commentary on the value of use and participation in the open source process – Netflix was clear that they see value in being an open source contributor / leader is that it preserves the future of their systems – rather than sitting back and letting the industry decide their direction with tools and tech, Netflix uses open source to help drive and lead the industry to where they see value.
- (I did resist the urge to ask the Netflix presenter when the next season of “House of Cards” would come out. 🙂 )
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One of the frequent questions that came up at the Dell booth was “what is Dell doing in big data?”
The answer? Actually… quite a bit, and for quite a while.
Between the Dell Apache Hadoop HW+SW+Services Solution, the Toad BI suite, the Kitenga analytics toolsets, and our growing HPC business, Dell has been a part of this movement since its early days. I’d recommend you drop us a line at Hadoop@Dell.com or visit us at http://www.Dell.com/Hadoop to learn more.
If you were out at the show this week, be sure to leave a comment on your thoughts as well.
Hope everyone has safe trips home, and we’ll see you at the next big data get-together!
Until next time,
JBG
@jbgeorge
Day 1: Big Data Innovation Summit 2014
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Hello from sunny, Santa Clara!
My team and I are here at the BIG DATA INNOVATION SUMMIT representing Dell (the company I work for), and it’s been a great day one.
I just wanted to take a few minutes to jot down some interesting ideas I heard today:
- In Daniel Austin’s keynote, he addressed that the “Internet of things” should really be the “individual network of things” – highlighting that the number of devices, their connectivity, their availability, and their partitioning is what will be key in the future.
. - One data point that also came out of Daniel’s talk – every person is predicted to generate 20 PETABYTES of data over the course of a lifetime!
. - Juan Lavista of Bing hit on a number of key myths around big data:
- the most important part of big data is its size
- to do big data, all you need is Hadoop
- with big data, theory is no longer needed
- data scientists are always right 🙂
QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Correlation does not yield causation.” – Juan Lavista (Bing)
- Anthony Scriffignano was quick to admonish the audience that “it’s not just about data, it’s not just about the math… [data] relationships matter.”
. - The state of Utah state government is taking a very progressive view to areas that analytics can help drive efficiency in at that level – census data use, welfare system fraud, etc. And it appears Utah is taking a leadership position in doing so.
I also had the privilege of moderating a panel on the topic of the convergence between HPC and the big data spaces, with representatives on the panel from Dell (Armando Acosta), Intel (Brent Gorda), and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (Niall Gaffney). Some great discussion about the connections between the two, plus tech talk on the Lustre plug-in and the SLURM resource management project.
Additionally, Dell product strategists Sanjeet Singh and Joey Jablonski presented on a number of real user implementations of big data and analytics technologies – from university student retention projects to building a true centralized, enterprise data hub. Extremely informative.
All in all, a great day one!
If you’re out here, stop by and visit us at the Dell booth. We’ll be showcasing our hadoop and big data solutions, as well as some of the analytics capabilities we offer.
(We’ll also be giving away a Dell tablet on Thursday at 1:30, so be sure to get entered into the drawing early.)
Stay tuned, and I’ll drop another update tomorrow.
Until next time,
JOSEPH
@jbgeorge
Michael Dell Comments on the “Data Economy”
This is a repost of my blog at http://dell.to/1euUcqk.
In this short interview with Inc., Michael Dell provides an overview of the company’s transformation into a leading player in the “data economy.”
As Michael notes, with the costs of collecting data decreasing, more companies in a growing number of industries are making better use of existing data sources, and gathering data from new sources.
And that’s where Dell has been enabling customers for years with solutions built with technologies like Hadoop and NoSql. Helping companies and organizations make better use of this data, and assisting them in using it to solve their challenges, are just a few of the ways Dell has changed the Big Data conversation, and built an entirely new enterprise business along the way.
As a member of the Technology CEO Council, Michael also recently joined other tech CEOs to discuss the data economy with policy makers. As an example of the potential of the data economy, he explained how Dell’s growing health information technology practice includes 7 billion medical images. These images are in an aggregated data set allowing researchers to mine them for patterns and predictive analytics.
“There’s lots that can be done with this data that was very, very siloed in the past,” Michael toldComputerworld, “We’re really just kind of scratching the surface.”
It’s certainly an exciting time to be at Dell – and the data revolution continues!
It’s OpenStack Foundation Election Time!
What is your relationship to OpenStack, and why is its success important to you? What would you say is your biggest contribution to OpenStack’s success to date?
I believe OpenStack represents a trend that service providers and enterprise IT are making to deeper community collaboration on new technologies and practices, and I will continue to drive the initiative to make my customers and the community successful in a very real-world meaningful way.
Describe your experience with other non profits or serving as a board member. How does your experience prepare you for the role of a board member?
What do you see as the Board’s role in OpenStack’s success?
What do you think the top priority of the Board should be in 2014?
1. Clarify the definition of OpenStack – what is core, what is compliant, and what is not.
2. Understand where the strategic opportunities lie for OpenStack as a technology, and clear the path to ensure OpenStack gets there.
3. Fully enable any and every new entrant to OpenStack in a real way – developers, implementers, and users – with the right level of documentation, tools, community support, and vendor support.
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Thanks, and appreciate your nomination to represent the OpenStack Foundation in 2014!
Until next time,
JOSEPH
@jbgeorge
THIS JUST IN: Dell, SUSE, Microsoft, and Cloudbase Collaborate to Enable Hyper-V for OpenStack-based SUSE Cloud 2.0
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(Note this is a cross-post of a blog I posted on the official Dell blog site, the company I work for. The original blog is at http://is.gd/Ie6s10.)
(Also note the press release this blog relates to is at http://is.gd/W7e1BZ.)
Dell and SUSE: refining the art and science of OpenStack cloud deployments
The Dell OpenStack cloud solutions team is excited to unveil our newly enhanced Dell SUSE Cloud Solution, powered by OpenStack. This newly enhanced cloud infrastructure solution makes multi-hypervisor clouds a reality. It is now possible to operate data center cloud environments with nodes running KVM, Xen, and Hyper-V hypervisors.
So, what is so new here?
These enhancement to the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution are delivered via Dell solution integration with SUSE Cloud 2.0 – an enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution for building private clouds now with the ability to support Hyper-V nodes installed by Crowbar.
We continue to listen to our customers, and understand their desire for choice. Through this solution we are providing customers a Microsoft hypervisor choice in addition to KVM. With support for multiple hypervisors, SUSE Cloud 2.0 provides extended flexibility so you can optimize cloud workloads on whatever hypervisor delivers the ideal operational and performance benefits in your environment. This flexibility is a key to efficiency in today’s hyper-heterogeneous data centers. After all, isn’t this what cloud computing is all about?
What exactly is the Dell SUSE Cloud Solution?
Simply put, this solution is an end-to-end private cloud solution, with the following core components:
- SUSE Cloud 2.0: SUSE’s enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution, with an integrated installation framework based on the Dell-initiated Crowbar open source project, enabling organizations to rapidly deploy OpenStack private clouds. This OpenStack distribution delivers all the integrated OpenStack projects including Nova, Swift, Cinder, Neutron, Keystone, Glance, and Dashboard.
- SUSE Studio: The award-winning SUSE image building solution enables enterprises to rapidly adapt and deploy applications into the SUSE Cloud image repository or public clouds.
- SUSE Manager: Manages Linux workloads and enables the efficient management, maintenance and monitoring of Linux workloads across physical, virtual, and public or private cloud environments.
- Dell platforms and reference architecture: The Dell SUSE Cloud Solution includes a validated and certified reference architecture with Dell PowerEdge C6220 and R720/R720XD server systems and Dell networking infrastructure.
- Dell and SUSE Professional services, support and training: Enterprise services for complete assessment, design, deployment and ongoing support, provided through a cooperative support model leveraging the combined capabilities of Dell and SUSE.
In addition to enhancing the core cloud software platform, the Dell and SUSE teams have delivered enhancements to the Dell Crowbar Operations Platform to rapidly instantiate hardware and deploy these multi-hypervisor environments.
Dell Crowbar is the robust open-source installation framework that simplifies, standardizes and automates the setup of OpenStack multi-hypervisor clouds. Dell and SUSE are actively developing and refining Crowbar, so you can fully configure your environment, automatically discover and configure new hardware platforms, and simply deploy the complete cloud software stack — all in a repeatable manner, in a fraction of the time required of manual efforts.
SUSE Studio and SUSE Manager are also available from SUSE, so you can quickly assemble applications into your image repository and easily monitor and maintain your deployed applications across your cloud resources.
Why consider open source solutions for your cloud?
Open source clouds allow you to innovate on open platforms and frameworks to accelerate your time-to-market and time-to-value. By leveraging community building and collaboration with the OpenStack project, you can gain direct control over your cloud infrastructure and the software you use to manage it – this is why OpenStack is the fastest growing open source project on the planet. Further, with OpenStack you have the opportunity to develop and refine our own features rather than wait for commercial vendors, who may or may not release the features you want when you want them.
Bottom line: OpenStack is faster, flexible, more cost efficient, and can be tuned for your environment.
How does OpenStack fit into Dell’s Cloud strategy?
Dell’s Cloud strategy is focused on three areas: enabling private cloud, deploying multi-cloud management and supplying cloud builders. OpenStack is key to our first pillar of enabling private clouds and allows us to provide customers with flexible, open cloud solutions so they can eliminate vendor lock-in and build solutions that best suit their needs.
Four Weeks, Four Webinars: A Deep Dive into the Dell SUSE Cloud Solution, Powered by OpenStack
Starting on September 26th, Dell and SUSE are hosting a webinar series for system administrators, DevOps engineers and solution architects. Please join us to get a step-by-step walkthrough of the joint Dell and SUSE OpenStack-based private cloud solution.
Shout out for OpenStack Summit
To learn more and Dell and SUSE solutions for OpenStack Clouds live Come and visit Dell at OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong. It’s coming fast – See you there!
Until next time.
JOSEPH
@jbgeorge
Rock The [OpenStack] Vote!
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Well its that time of the year again!
(I guess that’s fairly a open ended statement – I could be talking about the beginning of the school year, the start of football season, or the summer solstice.)
I’m talking about getting your votes in for sessions at the OpenStack Summit coming up in Hong Kong this November!
If you’re a member of the OpenStack community, you should have received a note this past week requesting your help to select which sessions should be represented at the Design Summit and User Conference this fall.
Now, let me be clear – this should not be a popularity contest on presenters (like me) or vendors (like Dell, the company I work for), but rather where you see need for certain experts to discuss a topic that is important to the OpenStack development community or to the OpenStack user community.
Yours truly has submitted a few sessions as well for your consideration – check it out:
- Remain Calm and Deploy On! (or How the Crowbar Community Is Innovating for Success with OpenStack)
In this session, I’m planning to highlight the importance of deployment technologies in implementing OpenStack as a cloud option, and how we’ve approached it by developing our own open source project, Crowbar. I’ll be joined by Crowbar community contributors Intel (who are working on Crowbar capabilities for Intel Hadoop and Intel TXT security) and SUSE (who have incorporated a SUSE skinned version of Crowbar into their SUSE Cloud product). I expect it will be a great interactive session with the goal of educating the audience on how Crowbar can enable them to get going faster with OpenStack.
- Enterprise Hypervisors: How Three Companies Are Making OpenStack with Hyper-V a Reality
Earlier this year, we announced Dell taking an active role in bringing true Hyper-V hypervisor support to OpenStack. To provide an update on progress there, I’m proposing a topic to present jointly with peers at SUSE, who we’ve partnered with on the Dell SUSE Cloud Solution, powered by OpenStack, and Cloudbase, who have been pioneers in Hyper-V enablement in OpenStack, to talk through how customers can implement a Hyper-V based OpenStack solution using technology from all three companies. There has been solid work to date, including Crowbar integration, so I expect this will be a lively one!
- Build in OpenStack Security with Crowbar and Intel TXT
I can’t tell you how excited I am about how the Crowbar project has evolved over the years. It started as an answer to the problem of “how do I deploy OpenStack on bare metal?” but has now emerged as a broad software platform for innovation covering cloud, hadoop, and other use cases. One telltale sign of progress to me is how others are leveraging Crowbar, and cloud security is definitely an interesting area. This session is one where I’ll present with my friends at Intel to talk through how Intel has developed Crowbar functionality for their Intel TXT secure resource pool solution. Expect a lot of Q&A on this one.
And that’s it!
Appreciate you voting with the community’s best interest in mind!
And you can learn more about the coming OpenStack Summit here – http://www.openstack.org/summit/openstack-summit-hong-kong-2013/
Until next time!
JBG
@jbgeorge
NOW HIRING: Cloud and Big Data Solution Marketing Rockstars
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As Dell (the company that I work for) continues to service customers in all facets of OpenStack and Hadoop implementations, we are beginning another season of growth on the Revolutionary Solutions team.
The Dell Revolutionary Solutions Team delivers the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution and the Dell Apache Hadoop Solution, leads the Crowbar open source project, and manages the Emerging Solutions Ecosystem Partner Program that includes a number of key partners such as Suse, Inktank, Cloudera, Datameer, and Pentaho.
We are looking for a variety of engineers and presales teams, but I will focus on the product management and marketing roles in this post.
Technical Product Managers – Product managers to be technical SMEs (roadmaps, requirements, etc) on partner products in the cloud and big data spaces, most notably OpenStack and Hadoop, but could also be focused on other emerging solutions spaces – Link to Job Posting
- Product Marketing Managers – Marketing experts to own and lead go-to-market strategy and deliverables in the cloud and big data spaces (marketing strategy, sales enablement, etc). Again, this would certainly cover our OpenStack and Hadoop solutions today, but could also focus on future emerging solutions spaces. – Link to Job Posting
- Open Source Community Manager / Evangelist – Community oriented professionals with strong networks, strong social media presence, and an ability to bring collaborators and customers together to work on common goals – Link to Job Posting
- Marketing Directors – Experienced people managers to drive business objectives, product vision, and go-to-market strategy, specifically in the areas of Product Management and Product Marketing – Link to Job Posting
In our experience, the best candidates
- have a track record of ownership
- have a techincal background
- are experienced in their discipline
- are participants in cloud, big data, virtualization, or similar emerging technologies
Pass it on to a friend or apply yourself – I look forward to hearing from you!
Until next time,
JBGeorge
@jbgeorge
Dell Cloud News: Hyper-V for OpenStack, Public Cloud Partner Program
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Two pieces of important cloud news coming out of Dell (the company I work for) today:
- Dell to Enable Hyper-V and Windows Server 2012 Support for OpenStack
Dell today announced it will enable Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V as a viable hypervisor choice for the OpenStack cloud platform. This development, which is the first instance of a leading technology vendor enabling Windows Server Hyper-V hypervisor on OpenStack for private clouds, will give customers additional flexibility and choice to run OpenStack workloads within their existing Windows Server environments.
More info here.
- Dell to Deliver Public Cloud through Partner Ecosystem
Dell is launching the Dell Cloud Partner Program to deliver public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) through an ecosystem of partners. Acting as a single-source supplier, Dell will offer customers a choice of vendors and technology, freedom from lock-in to a single platform or pricing model and a central point of solution integration and control. Sales of Dell’s current in-house multi-tenant public cloud IaaS will be discontinued in the U.S. in favor of best-in-class partner offerings.
More info here.
Both of these announcements highlight key tenets for our cloud strategy.
- First and foremost, our customers come first when it comes to new products, solutions, and services – they are the most important element in enabling the vendor lanscape understand where the priorities should be.
- We will continue to collaborate and learn from our customers as we develop products, solutions, and services in the cloud space. It is part of our DNA – plain and simple.
- Though our tactics evolve, our commitment to enabling our customers with cloud technology remains constant. Customers are finding success in cloud when partnering with Dell, and we’ll continue to keep that our mission.
- Specifically with OpenStack, our commitment to enabling the innovative cloud technology and community remains as solid as ever. We have been vocal advocates since Day 1 (something no other hardware solutions vendor can claim), and we have no intentions of slowing down.
From the Data Center Solutions (DCS) team, who have built and enabled some of the biggest public clouds in the world, to the Dell Revolutionary Solutions Team, who have been early entrants into the OpenStack and Hadoop spaces, and to Dell’s open source community in Crowbar, we’ve proven our commitment to innovation and customer success.
That is what we are about.
And don’t expect that to ever change.
Until next time,
JBGeorge
@jbgeorge
The JBGeorge Tech Blog 