Archive
I am seeking your vote(s) for the OpenStack Board
.
(This blog entry is one I co-authored with my colleague, Rob Hirschfeld – www.RobHirschfeld.com)
===============
If registered, you have 8 votes to allocate as you wish. You will get a link via email – you must use that link.
Joseph B George and Rob Hirschfeld are asking for your vote for individual member seats on the OpenStack Foundation board.
This is a key point in the OpenStack journey and we strongly encourage eligible voters to participate no matter who you vote for! As we have said before, success of the Foundation governance process matters just as much as the code because it ensures equal access and limits forking.
We think that OpenStack succeeds because it is collaboratively developed. It is essential that we select board members who have a proven record of community development, a willingness to partner and have demonstrated investment in the project.
Our OpenStack vision favors production operations by being operator, user and ecosystem focused. If elected, we will represent these interests by helping advance deployability, API specifications, open operations and both large and small scale cloud deployments.
Of the nominees, we best represent OpenStack users and operators (as opposed to developers). We have the most diverse experience in real-world OpenStack deployments because our solution has been deployed broadly (both as Dell and through Crowbar. We have a proven record of collaborating broadly with contributors, demonstrated skills at building the OpenStack community and doing real open source work to ensure that OpenStack is the most deployable cloud platform anywhere.
Let’s get specific about our leadership in the OpenStack project and community:
- We have been active and vocal leaders in the OpenStack community
- our team has established two very active user groups (Austin & Boston)
- we have lead multiple world-wide deploy day events (March 2012 & May 2012).
- We were the first OpenStack powered private cloud provider
- we have substantial experience in the field and know the challenges of running OpenStack for a wide variety of real-world deployments
- our first solution came out on Cactus! We’ve been delivering on Essex since OSCON 2012 (http://www.oscon.com/ ).
- We represent a broad range of deployment scenarios ranging from hosting, government, healthcare, retail, education, media, financial and more!
- We have broad engagements and partnerships at the infrastructure (SUSE, Canonical, Redhat), consulting (Canonical, Mirantis) and ecosystem layers (enStratus) and beyond!
- We have a proven track record of collaboration instead of forking/disrupting – a critical skill for this project reflected by our consistent actions to preserve the integrity of the project.
- We have led the “make OpenStack deployable” campaign with substantial investments (open source Crowbar, white papers, documentation & cookbooks.
- We have very long and consistent history with the project starting even before the first OpenStack summit in Austin.
Of course, we’re asking for you to consider for both of us; however, if you want to focus on just one then here’s the balance between us.
- Rob (bio) is a technologist with deep roots in cloud technology, data center operations and open source.
- Joseph is a business professional with experience new product introduction in cloud technology, user focus, and enterprise delivery.
Not sure if you can vote? If you registered as an individual member then your name should be on the voting list. In that case, you can vote between 8/20 and 8/24.
Thanks for your support!
Play Ball! Hadoop Players Sponsor Big Data Event in Chicago
.
.
What does data analytics have to do with baseball????
Well actually, quite a bit. Moneyball anyone?
(If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. A true story adaption about Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s using intense number crunching to build a solid baseball team in a smaller market, competing with bigger markets – and bigger salaries.)
The Technology
Last week, I had the pleasure of representing Dell (the company I work for), as we joined Intel, Cloudera, and Clarity to meet with a number of customers at the Ivy League Baseball Club across from Wrigley Field, right before the Cubs – Cardinals game. It was great to talk to customers who were using Hadoop, as well as those that were just learning about the technology.
The presentation delivered by all four companies focused on the Dell Apache Hadoop Solution, a powerful packaged solution that features
-
A reference architecture featuring Intel technology
-
A set of software which includes Cloudera’s CDH distribution (with option to upgrade to Cloudera Enterprise), along with Dell’s innovative Crowbar software framework to enable easy provisioing and management
-
Services provided by a combination of Dell, Cloudera, and Clarity, to provide our customers with deployment, support, and consulting services
.
The Experience
Even more impactful than the presentation was the more 1:1 time after the presentation, where many users and newbies shared stories, experiences, best practices, etc. Got to hear about a lot of the struggles around “going it alone”, and enthusiasm that Dell and our partners were delivering a solution that would make that a bit simpler.
Here’s a sampling of some of the topics that came up.
Why should I care about big data / hadoop?
Here’s the thing: you have data. It’s in your sales tracking system, from your website traffic, from your social media outlets, in your customer support databases, and more. And not only do you have data, you have A LOT of data. But here’s the power of data. Your company has strategic objectives, customer strategies, and product plans. Data gives you insight into how to best spend your resources, where to focus your product development, where your customers are buying your products, and what problems they are encountering. This enables your business to make intelligent decisions to better satisfy your customers.
I already have a data warehousing solution – what’s the benefit of hadoop?
Many analytics solutions today require data to be in a format that adheres to the standards of a relational database (aka structured data). This is fine for data that conforms to this format. However, a lot of the new data that is available to us is not formatted in that manner – this is referred to as unstructured data. Unstructured data includes data types, such as audio, video, graphics, log files, etc. Hadoop as a technology handles unstructured data very well, allowing for analysis of those types of data. Additionally, a number of the traditional enterprise level analytics solutions are building hadoop connectors to allow for hadoop processed data to be utilized by the enterprise tool set. Finally, as data scales, using an open source based technology like Hadoop makes things very cost efficient.
How does the Dell Apache Hadoop Solution help me with hadoop?
Before this solution was made available, many of our Dell customers came to us asking, “If Dell was going to build a hadoop solution, how would you design it?” And this was how we started down the path of hadoop. What we discovered was many customers had pockets of hadoop projects in their companies, but progress was at a crawl. Many of the issues were around infrastructure design, deployment, and overall general help around the technology. And that is the basis for the Dell Apache Hadoop Solution – making hadoop accessible, quick, and simple to deploy from bare metal and get to a functional hadoop cluster asap. We’ve enabled many of these customers to go from a science experiment to a productive Hadoop instance very quickly, and provide them the consulting and education they need to maximize its benefit.
You can learn more about what Dell is doing with Hadoop at www.Dell.com/Hadoop or you can drop me an email at Hadoop@Dell.com.
The Game
For those of you not interested in sports, you can now tune your TV’s off – about to talk baseball for a bit.
As far as the game went, it was a doozy. I have ties to Chicago, so I was rooting for the Cubs. 
- The Cubs were up 1-0 most of the game until the top of the 8th when Cardinal Matt Holliday knocked out a 2 run homer
- Trailing in the bottom of the 9th, Cubs first baseman Bryan Lahair hit a homer to tie it up 2-2, and take us into extra innings
- Here’s where the fireworks really began!
- Bottom of the 10th
- Cubs LF Tony Campana gets on base with a single
- Campana then tries to steal 2nd and barely makes it
- Cardinals coach Matt Matheny did not agree and made a federal case out of it with the 2nd base umpire
- And out goes Matheny – ejected!
- Cardinals walked Lahair
- With two men on base, Cubs LF Alfonso Soriano gets a single and drives Campana home for the 3-2 win!
- Prior to this, the Cardinals had beaten the Cubs in the LAST THIRTEEN SERIES between the two clubs. With this win, that streak has been broken.
Great game, great crowd, great partners! Thanks to everyone who came out. I look forward to the next one. 🙂
Until next time,
JBGeorge
@jbgeorge
THIS JUST IN: The Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution Expands Globally
.
It’s hard to believe that it’s only been eight months since Dell, the company I work for, brought the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution to market. 
It was a great day for Dell in that we were
- the first to bring an OpenStack based, on-premise cloud solution to market
- the first to make available a software framework like Crowbar (extending Opscode’s Chef tool)
- the first to provide a referencable Dell OpenStack customer in DreamHost
.
Being the agile team we are, we were very focused in our launch. We launched the solution in North America first, while 
we learned about the open source cloud needs of Europe and Asia and what our customers in those regions needed from an OpenStack solution.
We listened. We learned. We built. We tested. We took learnings back to our solution. And we retested. And got more customer input. And retested. And we built in our learnings.
(Should be a very familiar song and dance to the innovators out there.)
And that journey brings us to today.
With that exprience under our belt, I’m proud to say our team has reached our next milestone….
At World Hosting Days in Germany today, Dell will be announcing that our OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution will be launching in the UK, Germany, and China.
Our executive director, John Igoe, will be on stage at the event to talk through more details on the launch, supported by a great group of folks to help answer questions on the announcement and the solution.
As we take the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution into these new regions, it continues to feature:
- A validated and OpenStack-optimized reference architecture based on Dell’s infrastructure portfolio, including Dell PowerEdge C series and new 12G servers
- Open source OpenStack cloud software
- Dell developed Crowbar software to enable quick and easy deployment + continous integration
- Deployment, support, and consulting services
We’re very excited by the news today, and anticipate this will help accelerate OpenStack as a movement and a community. 
We’ve seen the OpenStack community grow so quickly and our friends in Europe and Asia are a strong part of what makes the OpenStack open source movement so great. In fact, I am happy to report that we’ve already begun enablng some of our customers in those areas to start with our solution.
If you’re interested in learning more about what Dell is doing with OpenStack, and more on the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution, you can visit www.Dell.com/OpenStack or drop us an email at OpenStack@Dell.com.
Until next time.
JOSEPH
@jbgeorge
More info:
- Dell.com/OpenStack
- Dell.com/Crowbar
- Crowbar’s public repository
- The Dell OpenStack case study featuring DreamHost
- RobHirschfeld.com – our lead architect’s blog
- BartonGeorge.net – our web / tech marketing director’s blog
TOP TEN: Why You Should Be At Tonight’s Austin OpenStack Meetup
.
OK, ladies and gentlemen – the top ten reasons for why you should head out to the Tech Ranch tonight for our first Austin OpenStack meetup.
OpenStack Meet Up Tonight (Thu, 10/27) 6:30pm at Tech Ranch Austin
10. There will be free food.
9. You’ll meet other Stackers and cloud fans in the Austin area.
8. You’ll get a first hand view of OpenStack, Diablo, and Crowbar
7. You’ll get to hobnob with OpenStack rockstars from Dell, Rackspace, Opscode, and other OpenStack supporters. (There are also rumors that Dell’s elusive and wildly handsome director of marketing will be in attendance.)
6. There will be free food.
5. You’ll learn about Crowbar from the people that actually wrote the software.
4. Remember the week-long OpenStack technical trainings that have been happening world-wide over the last month or so? This week, it’s in Austin, so we’ll have a number of out of town guests to meet up with.
3. JBG will provide timely World Series score updates.
2. Live demos. That’s always a crowd favorite.
1. OpenStack is one of the coolest new technology movements out there – this is a great way to dive into OpenStack!
(Oh, and there will be FREE FOOD.)
If you’re planning to head out, be sure to RSVP at http://www.meetup.com/OpenStack-Austin/events/37908242/
You can learn more about Dell’s doing with OpenStack by emailing me at OpenStack@Dell.com or visiting www.Dell.com/OpenStack
See you tonight!
JBGeorge
@jbgeorge
Big News: #Dell and #Cloudera Partner on #Hadoop Solution
.
Big news!
Today, Dell (the company I work for) has announced a solution offering in conjunction with Cloudera, called the Dell | Cloudera Solution for Apache Hadoop! It’s a fully deployable Hadoop solution made up of Dell PowerEdge C hardware, Dell and Cloudera software, and Dell and Cloudera services – the complete package.
(Note that this is the second solution that my team has put out in the last two weeks – if you missed last week’s OpenStack announcement, you can get more info here.)
But on to the star of today’s show!
We’d often hear from our customers that they were experimenting with Hadoop on Dell hardware to analyze sales data, marketing information, etc in order to better serve their own customers. And pretty soon, we were being asked, “What’s Dell’s point of view? What recommendations do you have for distributions, architecture, and implementation?”
Well, here’s the answer. The Dell | Cloudera Solution for Apache Hadoop.
What’s Under the Hood
- Hardware – similar to OpenStack, the reference architecture that this solution is built on is the innovative Dell PowerEdge C server line. Based out of Dell’s well known Data Center Solutions team (aka DCS), PowerEdge C server technology was born out of learnings from custom engagements with some of the biggest cloud and hyperscale environments in the world. What we discovered is that, despite custom requirements and specs, there was some commonality among the requests. Concepts like density, power efficiency, etc were at the top of the list when it came to these environments.
So we took what was common and built a line of servers that was ideal for cloud and hyperscale environments, which became the Dell PowerEdge C server family. And it is an ideal platform for our Hadoop solution, as all the tenets of scale apply when building out an optimal Hadoop instance.
- Software – Our partners, Cloudera, who are among the most established Hadoop vendors in the market, will be providing their distributions of the Hadoop software, as well as their CDH management tools, which are top notch. In addition, Dell will be providing our Crowbar software framework and a specific Cloudera barclamp as part of the solution. (As a refresher, we announced availability of Crowbar last week as part of our OpenStack announcement, which helps speed deployment CONSIDERABLY. In the case of the Dell Cloudera Solution for Apache Hadoop, it can speed bare metal deployment of a Hadoop cluster from days or weeks to less than one day!)
- Services – Dell and Cloudera are partnering to enable our customers to get going on a validated instance of Hadoop, and offer a variety of services from support of the entire stack of hardware and software, as well as training on the technologies that will enable our customers on Hadoop.
Now’s the time to get started on Hadoop, and the Dell | Cloudera Solution for Apache Hadoop can get you there.
Find out more about this new solution at www.Dell.com/Hadoop or get in touch with us at Hadoop@Dell.com.
More info:
- The Dell Cloudera solution website – http://www.Dell.com/Hadoop
- Barton George’s blog – http://bartongeorge.net/2011/08/04/introducing-the-dell-cloudera-solution-for-hadoop-harnessing-the-power-of-big-data/
- Rob Hirschfeld’s blog – http://www.RobHirschfeld.com/2011/08/04/dell-cloudera-hadoop
- My recent blog about Crowbar – https://jbgeorge.net/2011/08/01/the-dell-crowbar-software-framework-who-what-when-where-and-how/
- Email us for more info at Hadoop@Dell.com
Until next time,
JBG
@jbgeorge
The #Dell #Crowbar Software Framework: Who, What, When, Where, and How
.
It’s been about a week since Dell (the company I work for) officially announced the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution, the market’s first HW / SW / Services solution for OpenStack – and the response has been great!
(Check out my last blog post about it here for more details.)
Crowbar from Dell
Since this wasn’t your average announcement with a big company like Dell actually contributing to the community, I received a number of questions, comments, and accolades around our contributed software framework – Crowbar.
So I thought I’d pass on some of the people, history, functionality, and background behind Dell’s Crowbar software.
History
Since Dell had been a committed partner of OpenStack’s since it’s announcement in July of 2010 (over a year ago), we were among the first to begin working with the OpenStack code as we began developing the Dell solution for it. Since it was very early, very raw code, there was a lot of installing / testing / coding / re-testing / blowing it away / reinstalling / testing / coding / re-testing / blowing it away… you get the idea.
And as any cloud technology goes, deploying OpenStack on bare metal took time, effort, and expertise.
It wasn’t long before our solutions development team decided we’d automate this process to make our efforts quicker. But lo and behold, we discovered that others in the community were dealing with the same thing. A few early users indicated that it was taking them a full day to deploy OpenStack from start to finish, and in most cases, it was taking multiple days.
So we decided build out a quick, automated method of deploying OpenStack on bare metal technology that the whole community could use.
And Crowbar was born.
Functionality
Extending the capabilities of the Chef configuration management framework from Opscode, our team began developing Crowbar with the goal of installing a multi-node OpenStack cloud on bare metal PowerEdge C servers in less than four hours. “Multi-node” was a key requirement as almost every use case we encountered required that.
We announced Crowbar’s existence and development in early 2011, with our intent to field test, and then release to the open source community. Over the course of time, we began testing it out in various instances and scenarios, as well as demo-ing it at various cloud events. Many of you may remember us showcasing our progress at SCaLE, CloudConnect, and the Apr OpenStack Design Summit (which Dell sponsored).
With time and experience, we came across a number of requirements for this type of a tool – automated BIOS configuration, RAID configuration, network discovery and set up, installation of the open source system monitoring tool Nagios, installation of the open source performance monitoring tool Ganglia, and more. So we built it all in.
And based on the extensive cloud cloud experience on our team, we knew that cloud development and management is an ever evolving exercise – as the Dell OpenStack lead architect and OpenStack community celeb Rob Hirschfeld would say, “Cloud is always ready, and never finished.” So Crowbar is designed in a way to manage change. Add in a new supported server to the mix, and Crowbar detects it and proceeds to add it to the OpenStack pool. When software needs to be updated, Crowbar can be leveraged to update once, and deploy to all.
Barclamps
Dell Crowbar featuring Barclamps!
And what about new components that come out? There are a number of new OpenStack capabilities coming out of various projects – how do those get rolled in?
Barclamps.
(Yes, we designed Crowbar with modularity in mind.)
Think of it this way: Crowbar is made up of two general functionality categories – the Crowbar core and Crowbar barclamps. The Crowbar core contains all the main functionality that allows Crowbar to perform tasks. Barclamps are modules that actually perform a function. So need to deploy OpenStack Nova (aka cloud compute)? Leverage the Nova barclamp. Need to deploy OpenStack Swift (aka cloud storage)? Leverage the Swift barclamp.
Need to deploy some software that doesn’t have a barclamp?
You can create your own barclamp!
And that’s the beauty of Crowbar – we created (and will continue to create) barclamps that work for our customers, but we’re encouraging / training our customers to develop their own barclamps, and we want the community at large to do the same.
What real customers are doing with the Crowbar and the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution
In our press release, one of our OpenStack customers, DreamHost, spoke about their success with the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution. Along with Dell server technology and services, the innovative DreamHost team really picked up on the Crowbar tool. In fact, as they are working on hosted options for their Ceph technology, the DreamHost team has begun developing a barclamp for Ceph!
In fact, here’s what the DreamHost GM of Emerging Technologies, Ben Cherian, had to say about Crowbar:
“If Dell had not developed Crowbar, we would have been forced to write a similar tool ourselves. It’s a fundamental goal that we have in the company: automate, automate, automate. That’s how we drive down prices.”
Ben also went on to say that since Dell had already developed a technology like Crowbar, we ended up saving them four to six months of development time.
Common Questions
- Is Crowbar for Dell products only?
The Crowbar software that we’ve developed at Dell will obviously work with Dell supported platforms. But there is no reason that this framework will not work for any other vendor technology – all that needs to happen is for that vendor / user / community member to create a barclamp for that technology.
- Is Crowbar for OpenStack only?
Obviously, our original use case is for OpenStack – it has been tested and validated for that model. However, again, it is a flexible software framework. We can see a number of use cases for OpenStack, and welcome the community to use it where it makes sense.
- What do I get with Crowbar as a part of the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution vs open source Crowbar?
There are two main differences at this point:
First, open source Crowbar has everything that the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution Crowbar has, except for the BIOS and RAID capabilities, where we’re trying to clear some legal hurdles before we open source. Once those are cleared, we expect to open source those capabilities.
Second, when you get Crowbar as a part of the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution, you will get full support from Dell via Dell Services. Any questions, support, training you need on Crowbar, Dell delivers it.
Where do I get Crowbar?
OK, the question of the hour. How do you get Crowbar?
- You get Dell-supported Crowbar when you purchase the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution.
- You get open source Crowbar from our github site – http://www.github.com/dellcloudedge.
You can head over to http://www.RobHirschfeld.com and see much more TECHNICAL content on the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution and Crowbar. In addition to being our lead architect on OpenStack, Rob is actually one of the developers of the actual Crowbar software. (You can also follow him on Twitter at @zehicle.)
And as always, if you want to learn more about the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution, you can head to http://www.Dell.com/OpenStack. Or if you’d like to reach out to us to learn more, drop me and the gang a line at OpenStack@Dell.com.
Until next time,
JOSEPH
@jbgeorge
Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution
THIS JUST IN: Dell Announces the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution
.
On the heels of the one year anniversary of the OpenStack open source cloud operating system – here’s some awesome news…
Dell (the company I work for) announces the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution, the market’s first hardware + software + services OpenStack solution for customers seeking to build out their own OpenStack clouds!
Let’s take a look under the hood, shall we?
Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution
Hardware (Dell PowerEdge C cloud optimized servers)
Built on a reference architecture honed since DAY ONE of the OpenStack movement, the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution offers a hardware configuration featuring cloud optimized Dell PowerEdge C servers. Dell has built cloud infrastructure for some of the biggest names in the world, like Facebook and Microsoft Azure, and have used those learnings to develop the highly dense, power-efficient PowerEdge C servers that the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution has been architected with.
Software (Dell Crowbar deploying and managing the OpenStack cloud platform)
When Dell began testing OpenStack in mid 2010, we were installing it, testing it, blowing it away, reinstalling it, tweaking it, blowing it away, reinstalling it… you get the picture. And it wasn’t trivial. These deployments took considerable time, effort, and expertise, so we developed the Dell Crowbar software framework extending Opscode’s Chef automation, which can deploy MULTI-NODE OpenStack clouds in hours or even minutes, rather than days when done manually. (Anyone remember our team deploying a 6 node Nova and Swift OpenStack deployment in 29 minutes at CloudConnect?) Crowbar enables BIOS and RAID setup and configuration, network setup, deploys open source tools like Nagios and Ganglia for monitoring, and much more.
And hey, we’re a community here, right? So here’s what the OpenStack community has been waiting to hear – Dell has now open sourced Crowbar! We’ve made it available to the open source community via our Github site, which is linked below. My partner in crime, Rob Hirschfeld, goes into Crowbar deep on his blog, so I’ve provided a link to his site below as well. (FYI – we are still working through some of the legal aspects of BIOS and RAID capabilities, but decided to open source the rest of Crowbar while we work it out.)
And speaking of support…
Services (Dell Services + Rackspace Cloud Builders)
After a year of being in OpenStack, we’ve built up some expertise, so Dell Services, along with our partner Rackspace Cloud Builders, will be offering a plethora of services to help you make your OpenStack cloud a reality.
- Consulting
- Deployment
- Training
- Support for the entire solution – HW, Crowbar, OpenStack, etc
- And a host of other services direct from Dell Services
When you get the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution, you can call Dell for support on any aspect of the solution, and we’ll help you figure it out, with our crack support teams, our OpenStack engineers, and our OpenStack partners.
And those are the basics.
Fast. Easy. Now. The Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution
A few more comments….
Let me just say – I am proud that we’ve delivered this solution to market, but even PROUDER to be part of a company had the vision to see the potential of OpenStack on Day One. Yes, that’s a big deal to me.
I’d like to call out a number of partners we’ve worked with to get to this point – Rackspace, Citrix, Opscode, Canonical, Intel, and others – the community is a big deal in OpenStack, and it’s great to have their support in this announcement. I’m also very happy that one of our first Dell OpenStack customers, DreamHost, is a part of this announcement as well with a full case study on how they’re doing OpenStack with Dell. (HINT: they’re neck deep in Crowbar and loving it!)
We plan to celebrate the announcement big time at OSCON, so if you’re here, come by the Dell booth – demos, gear, giveaways, etc. And our breakout session will be on Thursday (10:40am in room E-141) – “Prying Open the Cloud with Dell Crowbar and OpenStack” – Rob will present the deep down details on Crowbar.
(And if you want to get in on the celebration, feel free to tweet the news and your thoughts – be sure to use hashtags #Dell, #OpenStack and #Crowbar…)
So What’s Next?
Time for YOU to start using this. The Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution, Crowbar, all of it. Talk to your Dell rep, emaial us at OpenStack@Dell.com, download Crowbar, start building Crowbar barclamps, discuss it in the forums, etc… and get started building OpenStack clouds with Dell.
More info:
- Dell OpenStack webpage
- Crowbar’s open source repository
- Press Release: Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution
- Rob Hirschfeld
- Barton George
- OpenStack.org
- Partners: Citrix Project Olympus, Rackspace Cloud Builders, Opscode Chef, Canonical, and Intel
Until next time,
JBG
@jbgeorge
OpenStack’s First Year: How a Committed Community Made a Difference
.
You know the saying: “Time flies when you’re having fun.”
This week has been a crazy one, so I didn’t get to chime in on Tuesday with my thoughts on the one year anniversary of OpenStack.
So today, I took some time to think back over the last year, and I realized how far we’ve come as a technology and as a community.
In addition to the solid OpenStack technology that is being guided by market requirements and pushing the envelope, I believe that the unique set of OpenStack developers, partners, and users has helped get it to where it is.
Pardon me, while I stroll through memory lane…
Design Summits
- Austin Design Summit (July 13 – 14, 2010) – I’m not sure if we could have called this one a design summit as it was more of a meeting of minds, lots of ideas, and a ton of excitement about this new platform called OpenStack. Got to hear from both Rackspace and NASA on the code bases, and how this could change the market. I specifically recall our group of cloud solution attendees from Dell (the company I work for) talking about how much potential this technology had. (And besides, this meeting was in our home town!)
OpenStack was announced publicly for the first time a few days later on the 19th. Dell was among a handful of companies who believed in the initiative back then – it was early – and we had to have vision.
- San Antonio Design Summit (Nov 9 – 12, 2010) – This was held at the Weston Centre in San Antonio, and I remember thinking “where did all these people come from???” We had a lot of international presence there from the UK, France, Japan, and other parts of the world. It was exciting to think that in just four months, we’d already started going global. I also recall we started talking to the business of OpenStack – licenses, brands, etc, which was a good sign of progress.
Dell did our part as well – Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus, a couple of Dell OpenStack rockstars, each spoke on OpenStack deployment, reference architectures, and operational models. We also contributed gear for the InstallFest later that week, made up of PowerEdge C6100s and C2100s (I also remember giving quite a few tours of the “server room” to see what Austin release was running on.)
- Santa Clara Design Summit (Apr 26 – 29, 2011)– Our first design summit on the west coast! This one is still pretty fresh in my mind, but what blew me away was again, the growth! The community grew and became more sophisticated. Those that were learning at the first two design summits were blossoming experts at this design summit, having lived through the evolution of OpenStack. Though I’m sure it was logistically nuts for the organizers as they greatly exceeded capacity, it was a great indicator that we were on to something special.
The Dell team gave it our all here as well – Rob gave a session on what Dell was doing with OpenStack and Crowbar, and my favorite – daily live demos of Crowbar deploying multi-node OpenStack clouds on bare metal servers! (I’d time our guys – the best time was 29 min minutes for a 6 node OpenStack cloud running on Dell PowerEdge C 6100’s – not too shabby!
(Anyone remember the Crowbar bunny shirts?)
Year One Partners
I just checked the OpenStack.org site, and at THIS MOMENT, there are 91 partners in the community. (Depending on when you read this, there could / will be more.)
You’ll find a number of key industry players there – Rackspace, Dell, Citrix, Intel, AMD, Cisco, Canonical, Brocade, Arista, Opscode, and more. And this group has done a lot to further the intiative over the last year.
Here are a list of a few examples.
- Rackspace announcing the creation of Rackspace Cloud Builders, who’s purpose in life is to service customers on OpenStack deployment, training, support, and consulting.
- Citrix announcing Project Olympus and a distribution of OpenStack to come soon
- Dell announces the Crowbar deployment software for OpenStack, and our intention to release an OpenStack solution to market
- Canonical announces their intention to make OpenStack the default cloud platform in the Ubuntu operating system
- Equinix’s sponsoring of a live OpenStack demo enviornment w support from Dell, Rackspace, and Citrix
- Real live production usage by companies like Internap
What a year.
I’d venture to say those of us who were there on Day 1 believed this was going to be big, but we’re excited that it has been adopted by the cloud community as much as it has.
And to all the partners, develeopers, and users who have made the first year amazing – I salute you.
We’re on to something big. 🙂
If you want to learn more about what Dell has done with OpenStack over the last year, and see if what we’re building is a fit for you, email us at OpenStack@Dell.com.
More info on OpenStack and the one year anniversary:
- The GREAT infographic from Rackspace on the past year! http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/blog/2011/07/19/happy-1st-birthday-openstack/
- Rackspace’s Lew Moorman: http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/blog/2011/07/19/what-a-year%C2%A0-openstack-at-one/
- Jim Curry’s blog on OpenStack.com http://www.openstack.org/blog/author/jimcurry/
- Derrick Harris’s great article on what’s next http://gigaom.com/cloud/openstack-turns-1-whats-next/
- The OpenStack.org Design Summit page – lots of historical info and pics http://www.openstack.org/blog/tag/design-summit/
- Dell’s Rob Hirschfeld’s (@zehicle) tech blog – a ton on OpenStack – http://www.RobHirschfeld.com
- The Dell OpenStack site featuring the popular technical whitepaper “Bootstrapping OpenStack Clouds” www.Dell.com/OpenStack
Until next time,
JOSEPH
@jbgeorge
#Dell and #OpenStack: An Insider Update
.
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
Cybera, OpenStack, Rackspace Cloud Builders and Dell
.
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.
.
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
The JBGeorge Tech Blog 