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Running for the OpenStack Board: “All In” on OpenStack

January 5, 2017 Leave a comment

This is a duplicate of a blog I authored for SUSE, originally published at the SUSE Blog Site.

In thinking about the OpenStack community, our approach to the project going forward, and the upcoming Board elections, I’m reminded of a specific hand of the poker game Texas Hold ‘Em I observed a few years back between two players.

As one particular hand began, both players had similar chip stacks, and were each dealt cards that were statistically favorable to win.

The hand played out like most other hands – the flop, the turn, the river, betting, calling, etc.  And as the game continued toward its conclusion, those of us observing the game could see that one player was playing with the statistically better cards, and presumably the win.

But then the second player made a bold move that turned everything on its head.

He went “all in.”

The “all in” move in poker is one that commits all of your chips to the pot, and often requires your opponent to make a decision for most or all of their chips. It is an aggressive move in this scenario.

After taking some time to consider his options, the first player ultimately chose to fold his strong cards and cut his perceived losses, allowing the other player to claim the winnings.

And this prize can be claimed almost completely because of the “all in” strategy.

Clearly, going “all in” can be a very strong move indeed.

 

Decision Time in OpenStack

Next week – Monday, January 9 through Friday, January 13 – is an important week for the OpenStack community, as we elect the 2017 Individual Representatives to the Foundation’s Board of Directors.

I’m honored to have been nominated as a candidate for Board Director, to potentially serve the community again, as I did back in 2013.

Back in the summer of 2010, I was fortunate to be one of the few in the crowded ball room at the Omni Hotel in Austin, Texas, witnessing the birth of the OpenStack project. And it is amazing to see how far it has come – but with a tremendous amount of work yet to do.

allinOver the years, we’ve been fortunate to celebrate tremendous wins and market excitement. Other times, there were roadblocks to overcome.  And similar to the aforementioned poker game, we often had to analyze “the hand” we were dealt, “estimate the odds” of where cloud customers and the market was headed, and position ourselves to maximize chances for success – often trusting our instinct, when available data was incomplete at best.

And, as with many new projects that are in growth phase, our community was often put in a position to re-confirm our commitment to our mission. And our response was resounding and consistent on where we stood….

“All in.”

 

Remaining “All In” with OpenStack

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, it’s critical that we stay committed to the cause of OpenStack and its objective.

There are four key areas of focus for OpenStack, that I hope to advocate, if elected to the board.

  1. OpenStack adoption within the enterprise worldwide.  I am in the camp that very much believes in the private cloud (as well as public cloud), and that the open source and vendor communities need to put more effort and resources into ensuring OpenStack is the optimal private cloud out there, across all industries / geographies / etc.
  2. Designing and positioning OpenStack to address tangible business challenges.  The enterprise customer is not seeking a new technology – they looking for things like ways to make IT management more self service, a means to drive on-demand scalability of infrastructure and PaaS, and a way to operate workloads on-premise, AS WELL AS off-premise.
  3. Addressing the cultural IT changes that need to occur.  As cloud continues to permeate the enterprise IT organization, we need to deliver the right training and certifications to enable existing IT experts to transition to this new means of IT service.  If we can ensure these valuable people have a place in the new archetype, they will be our advocates as well.
  4. Championing the OpenStack operator.  The reality of cloud is not just in the using, but in the operating.  There is a strong contingent of operators within our community, and their role is critical to our success – we need to continue to enable this important function.

I’ve been fortunate to be a part of a number of technology movements in my career, just as they started to make the turn from innovative idea to consistent, reliable IT necessity. And this is why I continue to be excited about the prospect of OpenStack – I’m seeing growth with more customers, more use cases, more production implementations.

And, while there are may be detractors out there, coining catchy and nonsensical “as-a-Service” buzzwords, my position on OpenStack should sound familiar – because it hasn’t changed since Day One.

“All in.”

And, if given the opportunity, I hope to partner with you to get the rest of the world “all in” on OpenStack as well.

Until next time,

JOSEPH
@jbgeorge

Joseph George is the Vice President of Solutions Strategy at SUSE, and is a candidate for OpenStack Board of Directors.  OpenStack Elections take place on the week of January 9, 2017.
Click here to learn more.

 

Categories: austin, Cloud Computing, open source, openstack, Tech Tags: , , , , , , ,

OpenStack, Now and Moving Ahead: Lessons from My Own Personal Transformation

December 15, 2016 Leave a comment

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This is a duplicate of a blog I authored for SUSE, originally published at the SUSE Blog Site.

It’s a transformative time for OpenStack.

90lbsAnd I know a thing or two about transformations.

Over the last two and a half years, I’ve managed to lose over 90 pounds.

(Yes, you read that right.)

It was a long and arduous effort, and it is a major personal accomplishment that I take a lot of pride in.

Lessons I’ve Learned

When you go through a major transformation like that, you learn a few things about the process, the journey, and about yourself.

With OpenStack on my mind these days – especially after being nominated for the OpenStack Foundation Board election – I can see correlations between my story and where we need to go with OpenStack.

While there are a number of lessons learned, I’d like to delve into three that are particularly pertinent for our open source cloud project.

1. Clarity on the Goal and the Motivation

It’s a very familiar story for many people.  Over the years, I had gained a little bit of weight here and there as life events occurred – graduated college, first job, moved cities, etc. And I had always told myself (and others), “By the time I turned 40 years old, I will be back to my high school weight.”

The year I was to turn 40, I realized that I was running out of time to make good on my word!

And there it was – my goal and my motivation.

So let’s turn to OpenStack – what is our goal and motivation as a project?

According to wiki.OpenStack.org, the Openstack Mission is “to produce the ubiquitous Open Source Cloud Computing platform that will meet the needs of public and private clouds regardless of size, by being simple to implement and massively scalable. OpenStack is open source, openly designed, openly developed by an open community.”

That’s our goal and motivation

  • meet the needs of public and private clouds
  • no matter the size
  • simple to deploy
  • very scalable
  • open across all parameters

While we exist in a time where it’s very easy to be distracted by every new, shiny item that comes along, we must remember our mission, our goal, our motivation – and stay true to what we set out to accomplish.

2. Staying Focused During the “Middle” of the Journey

When I was on the path to lose 90 pounds, it was very tempting to be satisfied during the middle part of the journey.

After losing 50 pounds, needless to say, I looked and felt dramatically better than I had been before.  Oftentimes, I was congratulated – as if I had reached my destination.

But I had not reached my destination.

While I had made great progress – and there were very tangible results to demonstrate that – I had not yet fully achieved my goal.  And looking back, I am happy that I was not content to stop halfway through. While I had a lot to be proud of at that point, there was much more to be done.

OpenStack has come a long way in its fourteen releases:

  • The phenomenal Newton release focused on scalability, interoperability, and resiliency – things that many potential customers and users have been waiting for.
  • The project has now been validated as 100% compliant by the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) as part of the Linux Foundation, a major milestone toward the security of OpenStack.
  • Our community now offers the “Certified OpenStack Adminstrator” certification, a staple of datacenter software that much of the enterprise expects, further validating OpenStack for them.

We’ve come a long way.   But there is more to go to achieve our ultimate goal.  Remember our mission: open source cloud, public and private, across all size clouds, massively scalable, and simple to implement.

We are enabling an amazing number of users now, but there is more to do to achieve our goal. While we celebrate our current success, and as more and more customers are being successful with OpenStack in production, we need to keep our eyes on the prize we committed to.

3. Constantly Learning and Adapting

While losing 90 pounds was a major personal accomplishment, it could all have been in vain if I did not learn how to maintain the weight loss once it was achieved.

This meant learning what worked and what didn’t work, as well as adapting to achieve a permanent solution.

Case in point: a part of most weight loss plans is to get plenty of water daily, something I still do to this day. While providing numerous health advantages, it is also a big help with weight loss. However, I found that throughout the day, I would get consumed with daily activities and reach the end of the day without having reached my water requirement goal.

Through some experimentation with tactics – which included setting up reminders on my phone and keeping water with me at all times, among other ideas – I arrived at my personal solution: GET IT DONE EARLY.

I made it a point to get through my water goal at the beginning of the day, before my daily activities began. This way, if I did not remember to drink regularly throughout the day, it was of no consequence since I had already met my daily goal.

We live in a world where open source is getting ever more adopted by more people and open source newbies. From Linux to Hadoop to Ceph to Kubernetes, we are seeing more and more projects find success with a new breed of users.  OpenStack’s role is not to shun these projects as isolationists, but rather understand how OpenStack adapts so that we get maximum attainment of our mission.

This also means that we understand how our project gets “translated” to the bevy of customers who have legitimate challenges to address that OpenStack can help with. It means that we help potential user wade through the cultural IT changes that will be required.

Learning where our market is taking us, as well as adapting to the changing technology landscape, remains crucial for the success of the project.

Room for Optimism

I am personally very optimistic about where OpenStack goes from here. We have come a long way, and have much to be proud of.  But much remains to be done to achieve our goal, so we must be steadfast in our resolve and focus.

And it is a mission that we can certainly accomplish.  I believe in our vision, our project, and our community.

And take it from me – reaching BIG milestones are very, very rewarding.

Until next time,

JOSEPH
@jbgeorge

Categories: big data, Cloud Computing, hadoop, high performance computing, Innovation, open source, openstack, storage, Tech, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

HPC: Enabling Fraud Detection, Keeping Drivers Safe, Helping Cure Disease, and So Much More

November 14, 2016 Leave a comment

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This is a duplicate of a blog I authored for SUSE, originally published at the SUSE Blog Site.

Ask kids what they want to be when they grow up, and you will often hear aspirations like:

  • “I want to be an astronaut, and go to outer space!”
  • “I want to be a policeman / policewoman, and keep people safe!”
  • “I want to be a doctor – I could find a cure for cancer!”
  • “I want to build cars / planes / rocket ships / buildings / etc – the best ones in the world!”
  • “I want to be an engineer in a high performance computing department!”

OK, that last one rarely comes up.

Actually, I’ve NEVER heard it come up.

But here’s the irony of it all…

That last item is often a major enabler for all the other items.

Surprised?  A number of people are.

For many, “high performance computing” – or “HPC” for short – often has a reputation for being a largely academic engineering model, reserved for university PhDs seeking to prove out futuristic theories.

The reality is the high performance computing has influenced a number of things we take for granted on a daily basis, across a number of industries, from healthcare to finance to energy and more.

medicalHPC has been an engineering staple in a number of industries for many years, and has enabled a number of the innovations we all enjoy on a daily basis. And it’s a critical function of how we will function as a society going forward.

Here are a few examples:

  • Do you enjoy driving a car or other vehicle?  Thank an HPC department at the auto manufacturer. There’s a good chance that an HPC effort was behind modeling the safety hazards that you may encounter as a driver.  Unexpected road obstacles, component failure, wear and tear of parts after thousands of miles, and even human driver behavior and error.
  • Have you fueled your car with gas recently?  Thank an HPC department at the energy / oil & gas company.  While there is innovation around electric vehicles, many of us still use gasoline to ensure we can get around.  Exploring for, and finding, oil can be an arduous, time-consuming, expensive effort.  With HPC modeling, energy companies can find pockets of resources sooner, limiting the amount of exploratory drilling, and get fuel for your car to you more efficiently.
  • Have you been treated for illnesses with medical innovation?  Thank an HPC department at the pharmaceutical firm and associated research hospitals.  Progress in the treatment of health ailments can trace innovation to HPC teams working in partnership with health care professionals.  In fact, much of the research done today to cure some of the world’s diseases and genomics are done on HPC clusters.
  • Have you ever been proactively contacted by your bank on suspected fraud on your account?  Thank an HPC department at the financial institution.  Often times, banking companies will use HPC cluster to run millions of “monte carlo simulations” to model out financial fraud and intrusive hacks.  The amount of models required and the depth at which they analyze requires a significant amount of processing power, requiring a stronger-than-normal computing structure.

And the list goes on and on.

  • Security enablementspace
  • Banking risk analysis
  • Space exploration
  • Aircraft safety
  • Forecasting natural disasters
  • So much more…

If it’s a tough problem to solve, more likely than not, HPC is involved.

And that’s what’s so galvanizing about HPC. It is a computing model that enables us to do so many of the things we take for granted today, but is also on the forefront of new innovation coming from multiple industries in the future.

HPC is also a place where emerging technologies get early adoption, mainly because experts in HPC require new tech to get even deeper into their trade.  Open source is a major staple of this group of users, especially with deep adoption of Linux.

You also see early adoption of open source cloud tech like OpenStack (to help institutions share compute power and storage to collaborate) and of open source distributed storage tech like Ceph (to connect highly performant file systems to colder, back up storage, often holding “large data.”)  I anticipate we will see this space be among the first to broadly adopt tech in Internet-of-Things (IoT), blockchain, and more.

Business CommunicationHPC has been important enough that the governments around the world have funded multiple initiatives to drive more innovation using the model.  Here are a few examples:

This week, there is a large gathering of HPC experts in Salt Lake City (SuperComputing16) for engineers and researchers to meet / discuss / collaborate on enabling HPC more.  From implementing tech like cloud and distributed storage, to best practices in modeling and infrastructure, and driving progress more in medicine, energy, finance, security, and manufacturing, this should be a stellar week of some of the best minds around.  (SUSE is out here as well – David has a great blog here on everything that we’re doing at the event.)

High performance computing: take a second look – it may be much more than you originally thought.

And maybe it can help revolutionize YOUR industry.

Until next time,

JOSEPH
@jbgeorge

Categories: big data, Cloud Computing, hadoop, high performance computing, Innovation, open source, openstack, storage Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Highlights from OpenStack Summit Barcelona

October 31, 2016 Leave a comment

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This is a duplicate of a blog I authored for SUSE, originally published at the SUSE Blog Site.

What a great week at the OpenStack Summit this past week in Barcelona! Fantastic keynotes, great sessions, and excellent hallway conversations.  It was great to meet a number of new Stackers as well as rekindle old friendships from back when OpenStack kicked off in 2010.

A few items of note from my perspective:

OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors Meeting

OpenStack Board In Session

As I mentioned in my last blog, it is the right of every OpenStack member to attend / listen in on each board meeting that the OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors holds.  I made sure to head out on Monday and attend most of the day.  There was a packed agenda so here a few highlights:

  • Interesting discussion around the User Committee project that board member Edgar Magana is working toward, with discussion on its composition, whether members should be elected, and if bylaw changes are warranted.  It was a deep topic that required further time, so the topic was deferred to a later discussion with work to be done to map out the details. This is an important endeavor for the community in my opinion – I will be keeping an eye on how this progresses.
  • A number of strong presentations by prospective gold members were delivered as they made their cases to be added to that tier. I was especially happy to see a number of Chinese companies presenting and making their case.  China is a fantastic growth opportunity for the OpenStack projecct, and it was encouraging to see players in that market discuss all they are doing for OpenStack in the region.  Ultimately, we saw City Network, Deutsche Telekom, 99Cloud and China Mobile all get voted in as Gold members.
  • Lauren Sell (VP of Marketing for the Foundation) spoke on a visionary model to where her team is investigating how our community can engage with other projects in terms of user events and conferences.  Kubernetes, Ceph, and other projects were named as examples.  This is a great indicator of how we’ve evolved, as it highlights that often multiple projects are needed to address actual business challenges.  A strong indicator of maturity for the community.

Two Major SUSE OpenStack Announcements

SUSE advancements in enterprise ready OpenStack made its way to the Summit in a big way this week.

  1. SUSE OpenStack Cloud 7:  While we are very proud to be one of the first vendors to provide an enterprise-grade Newton based OpenStack distribution, this release also offers features like new Container-as-a-Service capabilities and non-disruptive upgrade capabilities.

    Wait, non-disruptive upgrade?  As in, no downtime?  And no service interruptions?

    That’s right – disruption to service is a big no-no in the enterprise IT world, and now SUSE OpenStack Cloud 7 provides you the direct ability to stay live during OpenStack upgrade.

  2. Even more reason to become a COA.  All the buzz around the Foundation’s “Certified OpenStack Administrator” exam got even better this week when SUSE announced that the exam would now feature the SUSE platform as an option.

    And BIG bonus win – if you pass the COA using the SUSE platform, you will be granted

    1. the Foundation’s COA certification
    2. SUSE Certified Administrator in OpenStack Cloud certificatio

That’s two certifications with one exam.  (Be sure to specify the SUSE platform when taking the exam to take advantage of this option.)

There’s much more to these critical announcements so take a deeper look into them with these blogs by Pete Chadwick and Mark Smith.  Worth a read.

 Further Enabling the Enterprise

As you know, enterprise adoption of OpenStack is a major passion of mine – I’ve captured a couple more signs I saw this week of OpenStack continuing to head in the right direction.

  • Progress in Security. On stage this week, OpenStack was awarded the CII, the Core Infrastructure Initiative Best Practices badge.  The CII is a project out of the Linux Foundation project that validates open source projects, specific for security, quality and stability. By winning this award, OpenStack is now validated by a trusted third party and is 100% compliant.  Security FTW!
  • Workload-based Sample Configs.  This stable of assets has been building for some time, but OpenStack.org now boasts a number of reference architectures addressing some of the most critical workloads.  From web apps to HPC to video processing and more, there are great resources on how to get optimize OpenStack for these workloads.  (Being a big data fan, I was particularly happy with the big data resources here.)

I’d be interested in hearing what you saw as highlights as well – feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments section.

OK, time to get home, get rested – and do this all over again in 6 months in Boston.

(If you missed the event this time, OpenStack.org has you covered – start here to check out a number of videos from the event, and go from there.)

Until next time,

JOSEPH
@jbgeorge

 

Boston in 2017!

Categories: Cloud Computing, Innovation, open source, openstack, storage, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , ,

This Week: OpenStack Summit Barcelona!

October 26, 2016 Leave a comment

ossummit-barcelonaThis is a duplicate of a blog I authored for SUSE, originally published at the SUSE Blog Site.

In a few days, Stackers will congregate in beautiful Barcelona, Spain to kick off the bi-annual OpenStack Summit and User Conference, the 14th of its kind.

On the heels of the recent OpenStack Newton launch, we will see a wide variety of people, backgrounds, industries, and skill sets represented, all focused on learning about, sharing best practices on, and working on the future of OpenStack.

There are many great sessions, workshops, and evening events happening at the summit this coming week, but three in particular that I want to highlight.

OpenStack Board of Directors Meeting

Did you know that, since OpenStack is an open community, the OpenStack Foundation board meeting is open for members to attend and listen in to the discussion? It’s great for members to have this level of access , so take advantage of the openness built into the OpenStack community, and take a listen.

While there are some portions of the meeting that will be a closed session (rightly so), most of the meeting you’ll hear about progress in specific initiatives, comments on new members to the community, and hear back on future directions.

It’s a great experience that more of our members need to participate in, so I highly recommend it to members. You can check out the planned agenda and WebEx details here.

 

OpenStack Ops Meetup

I mentioned the OpenStack operator community in my last blog (“Renewing Focus on Bringing OpenStack to the Masses”), and how I feel strongly about championing the cause of the operators out there.

While many of us are focused on code design, quality, new projects, etc, the operators are tasked with implementing Openstack.  This involves the day-to-day effort of running OpenStack clouds, which include readying IT environments for OpenStack deployments, first hand implementation of the project, the ongoing maintenance and upgrade aspects of the cluster, and being driven by a specific business goal they will be measured by.

At this Summit, the Operators will be hosting an Ops Meetup to get into the meat of OpenStack Ops. Now this stands to be an intense, down-in-the weeds discussion – not for the faint of heart! 🙂  So if you are among the many tasked with getting OpenStack operational in your environment, head on over and get to know your peers in this space, swap stories of what works well, share best practices, and make connections you can stay in touch with for years to come.

Learn more about the Ops Meetup here.

Certified OpenStack Administrator (COA)

Are you aware that you can now be CERTIFIED as an OpenStack Admin?

The COA is an exam you can take to prove your ability to solve problems using both command line and graphical interfaces OpenStack, demonstrating that you have mastered a number of skills required to operate the solution.

At OpenStack Summit, there are a few COA activities occurring that you should be aware of:

  • COA 101. Anne Bertucio and Heidi Bretz of the OpenStack Foundation will be hosting a 30min beginner-level session on the topic of COA, touching on the why / what / how relating to the COA exam.  (More info here.)
  • COA booth. The Foundation Lounge at the Summit will feature an area dedicated to learning more about the COA.  A variety of OpenStack community volunteers will be pitching in to answer questions, find trainings, and even sign up for the COA.  I plan on helping out on Wednesday right after the morning keynotes, so stop by and let’s chat COA.
  • COA exams.  If you’re ready now to take the exam, head on over to https://www.openstack.org/coa/ and get the details on when you can take the exam.  The world needs Certified OpenStack Admins!

(PS – If you need help with some prep, SUSE’s happy to help there – click here to get details on COA training from SUSE.)

I’m looking forward to a great week of re-connecting with a number of you I haven’t seen in some time, so if you’re out at Barcelona, look me up – I’d love to hear what OpenStack project you’re working on, or learn about how you are implementing OpenStack, or where I can help with places OpenStack can further help you in your business objectives.

See you in Barcelona!

JOSEPH
@jbgeorge

Categories: Cloud Computing, Innovation, open source, openstack, Tech Tags: , , , , ,

Renewing Focus on Bringing OpenStack to the Masses

October 17, 2016 Leave a comment

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This is a duplicate of a blog I authored for SUSE, originally published at the SUSE Blog Site.

Happy Newton Release Week!

This 14th release of OpenStack is one we’ve all been anticipating, with its focus on scalability, resiliency, and overall user experience – important aspects that really matter to enterprise IT organizations, and that help with broader adoption of OpenStack with those users.

(More on that later.)

Six years of Community, Collaboration, and Growth

I was fortunate enough to have been at the very first OpenStack “meeting of the minds” at the Omni hotel in Austin, back in 2010, when just the IDEA of OpenStack was in preliminary discussions. Just a room full of regular everyday people, across numerous industries, who saw the need for a radical new open source cloud platform, and had a passion to make something happen.

And over the years, we’ve seen progress: the creation of the OpenStack Foundation, thousands of contributors to the project, scores of companies throwing their support and resources behind OpenStack, the first steps beyond North America to Europe and Asia (especially with all the OpenStack excitement in India, China, and Japan), numerous customers adopting our revolutionary cloud project, and on and on.

Power to the People

But this project is also about our people.

And we, as a community of individuals, have grown and evolved over the years as well – as have the developers, customers and end users we hope to serve with the project. What started out with a few visionary souls has now blossomed into a community of 62,000+ members from 629 supporting companies across 186 countries.

As a member of the community, I’ve seen positive growth in my own life since then as well.  I’ve been fortunate to have been part of some great companies – like Dell, HPE, and now SUSE.  And I’ve been able to help enterprise customers solve real problems with impactful open source solutions in big data, storage, HPC, and of course, cloud with OpenStack.

And there might have been one other minor area of self-transformation since those days as well, as the graphic illustrates… 🙂

JBG_BeforeAfter

Clearly we – the OpenStack project and the OpenStack people – are evolving for the better.

 

So Where Do We Go From Here?

In 2013, I was able to serve the community by being a Director on the OpenStack Foundation Board. Granted, things were still fairly new – new project ideas emerging, new companies wanting to sponsor, developers being added by the day, etc – but there was a personal focus I wanted to drive among our community.

“Bringing OpenStack to the masses.”

And today, my hope for the community remains the same.

While we celebrate all the progress we have made, here are some of my thoughts on what we, as a community, should continue to focus on to bring OpenStack to the masses.

Adoption with the Enterprise by Speaking their Language

Take a look at the most recent OpenStack User Survey. It provides a great snapshot into the areas that users need help.

  • “OpenStack is great to recommend, however there’s a fair amount of complexity that needs to be tackled if one wishes to use it.”
  • “OpenStack lacks far too many core components for anything other than very specialized deployments.”
  • “Technology is good, but no synergies between the sub-projects.”

2016 data suggests that enterprise customers are looking for these sorts of issues to be addressed, as well as security and management practices keeping pace with new features. And, with all the very visible security breaches in recent months, the enterprise is looking for open source projects to put more emphasis on security.  In fact, many of the customers I engage with love the idea of OpenStack, but still need help with these fundamental requirements they have to deal with.

Designing / Positioning OpenStack to Address Business Challenges

Have you ever wondered why so many tall office buildings have revolving doors? Isn’t a regular door simpler, less complex, and easier to use?  Why do we see so many revolving doors, when access can be achieved so much simpler with other means?

Because revolving doors don’t exist to solve access problems – they solve a heated-air loss problem.

When a door in a tall building is opened, cold air from outside forces it’s way inside when doors are open, pushing warmer / lighter air up – which is then lost through vents at the top of the building. Revolving doors limit that loss incredibly by sealing off portions of outside access when rotating.

Think of our project in the same way.OpenStackIndustries

  • What business challenges can be addressed today / near-term by implementing an OpenStack-based solution?
  • Beyond the customer set looking to build a hosted cloud to resell, what further applications can OpenStack be applied to?
  • How can OpenStack provide an industry-specific competitive advantage to the financial sector?  To healthcare?  To HPC?  To the energy sector?  How about retail or media?

Address the Cultural IT Changes that Need to Happen

I recently read a piece where Jonathan Bryce spoke to the “cultural IT changes that need to occur” – and I love that line of thinking.

Jonathan specifically said “What you do with Windows and Linux administrators is the bigger challenge for a lot of companies. Once you prove the technology, you need policies and training to push people.”

That is spot on.

What we are all working on with OpenStack will fundamentally shift how IT organizations will operate in the future. Let’s take the extra step, and provide guidance to our audiences on how they can evolve and adapt to the coming changes with training, tools, community support, and collaboration. A good example of this is the Certified OpenStack Administrator certification being offered by the Foundation, and training for the COA offered by the OpenStack partner ecosystem.

Further Champion the OpenStack Operator

Operators are on the front lines of implementing OpenStack, and “making things work.” There is no truer test of the validity of our OpenStack efforts than when more and more operators can easily and simply deploy / run / maintain OpenStack instances.

I am encouraged by the increased focus on documentation, connecting developers and operators more, and the growth of a community of operators sharing stories on what works best in practical implementation of OpenStack. And we will see this grow even more at the Operator Summit in Barcelona at OpenStack Summit (details here).

We are making progress here but there’s so much more we can do to better enable a key part of our OpenStack family – the operators.

The Future is Bright

Since we’re celebrating the Newton release, the quote from Isaac Newton on looking ahead is seems fitting…

“To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.”

When it comes to where OpenStack is heading, I’m greatly optimistic.  As it has always been, it will not be easy.  But we are making a difference.

And with continued and increased focus on enterprise adoption, addressing business challenges, aiding in the cultural IT change, and an increased focus on the operator, we can go to the next level.

We can bring OpenStack to the masses.

See you in Barcelona in a few weeks.

Until next time,

JOSEPH
@jbgeorge

 

Categories: Cloud Computing, Innovation, open source, openstack, Uncategorized Tags: , , , ,

Living Large: The Challenge of Storing Video, Graphics, and other “LARGE Data”

August 25, 2016 Leave a comment

.

UPDATE SEP 2, 2016: SUSE has released a brand new customer case study on OrchardPark_SUSEEnterpriseStorage“large data” featuring New York’s Orchard Park Police Department, focused on video storage.  Read the full story here!

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This is a duplicate of a blog I authored for SUSE, originally published at the SUSE Blog Site.

Everyone’s talking about “big data” – I’m even hearing about “small data” – but those of you who deal in video, audio, and graphics are in the throes of a new challenge:  large data.

Big Data vs Large Data

It’s 2016 – we’ve all heard about big data in some capacity – generally speaking, it is truckloads of data points from various sources, magnanimous in its volume (LOTS of individual pieces of data), its velocity (the speed at which that data is generated), and its variety (both structured and unstructured data types).  Open source projects like Hadoop have been enabling a generation of analytics work on big data.

So what in the world am I referring to when I say “large data?”

For comparison, while “big data” is a significant number of individual data that is of “normal” size, I’m defining “large data” as an individual piece of data that is massive in its size. Large data, generally, is not required to have real-time or fast access, and is often unstructured in its form (ie. doesn’t conform to the parameters of relational databases).

Some examples of large data:

LargeDataChart1

 

Why Traditional Storage Has Trouble with Large Data

So why not just throw this into our legacy storage appliances?

Traditional storage solutions (much of what is in most datacenters today) is great at handling standard data.  Meaning, data that is:

  • average / normal in individual data size
  • structured and fits nicely in a relational database
  • when totaled up, doesn’t exceed ~400TB or so in total space

Unfortunately, none of this works for large data.  Large data, due to its size, can consume traditional storage appliances VERY rapidly.  And, since traditional storage was developed when data was thought of in smaller terms (megabytes and gigabytes), large data on traditional storage can bring about performance / SLA impacts.

So when it comes to large data, traditional storage ends up being consumed too rapidly, forcing us to consider adding expensive traditional storage appliances to accommodate.

“Overall cost, performance concerns, complexity and inability to support innovation are the top four frustrations with current storage systems.” – SUSE, Software Defined Storage Research Findings (Aug 2016)

Object Storage Tames Large Data

Object storage, as a technology, is designed to handle storage of large, unstructured data from the ground up.  And since it was built on scalable cloud principles, it can scale to terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, and theoretically beyond.

When you introduce open source to the equation of object storage software, the economics of the whole solution become even better. And since scale-out, open source object storage is essentially software running on commodity servers with local drives, the object storage should scale without issue – as more capacity is needed, you just add more servers.

When it comes to large data – data that is unstructured and individually large, such as video, audio, and graphics – SUSE Enterprise Storage provides the open, scalable, cost-effective, and performant storage experience you need.

SUSE Enterprise Storage – Using Object Storage to Tame Large Data

Here’s how:

  • It is designed from the ground-up to tackle large data.  The Ceph project, which is core of SUSE Enterprise Storage, is built on a foundation of RADOS (Reliable Autonomic Distributed Object Store), and leverages the CRUSH algorithm to scale data across whatever size cluster you have available, without performance hits.
  • It provides a frequent and rapid innovation pace. It is 100% open source, which means you have the power of the Ceph community to drive innovation, like erasure coding.  SUSE gives these advantages to their customers by providing a full updated release every six months, while other Ceph vendors give customers large data features only as part of a once-a-year release.
  • It offers pricing that works for large data. Many object storage vendors, both commercial and open source, choose to charge you based on how much data you store.  The price to store 50TB of large data is different than the price to store 100TB of large data, and there is a different price if you want to store 400TB of large data – even if all that data stays on one server!  SUSE chooses to provide their customers “per node” pricing – you pay subscription only as servers are added.  And when you use storage dense servers, like the HPE Apollo 4000 storage servers, you get tremendous value.

 

Why wait?  It’s time to kick off a conversation with your SUSE rep on how SUSE Enterprise Storage can help you with your large data storage needs.  You can also click here to learn more.

Until next time,

JOSEPH

@jbgeorge

Categories: big data, Innovation, open source, openstack, storage, Tech, Uncategorized

Tech in Real Life: Content Delivery Networks, Big Data Servers and Object Storage

April 6, 2015 Leave a comment

.

This is a duplicate of a blog I authored for HP, originally published at hp.nu/Lg3KF.

In a joint blog authored with theCube’s John Furrier and Scality’s Leo Leung, we pointed out some of the unique characteristics of data that make it act and look like a vector.

At that time, I promised we’d delve into specific customer uses for data and emerging data technologies – so let’s begin with our friends in the telecommunications and media industries, specifically around the topic of content distribution.

But let’s start at a familiar point for many of us…

If you’re like most people, when it comes to TV, movies, and video content, you’re an avid (sometimes binge-watching) fan of video streaming and video on-demand.  More and more people are opting to view content via streaming technologies.  In fact, a growing number of broadcast shows are viewed on mobile and streaming devices, as are a number of live events, such as this year’s NCAA basketball tournament via streaming devices.

These are fascinating data points to ponder, but think about what goes on behind them.

How does all this video content get stored, managed, and streamed?

Suffice it to say, telecom and media companies around the world are addressing this exact challenge with content delivery networks (CDN).  There are a variety of interesting technologies out there to help develop CDNs, and one interesting new technology to enable this is object storage, especially when it comes to petabytes of data.

Here’s how object storage helps when it comes to streaming content.

  • With streaming content comes a LOT of data.  Managing and moving that data is a key area to address, and object storage handles it well.  It allows telecom and media companies to effectively manage many petabytes of content with ease – many IT options lack that ability to scale.  Features in object storage like replication and erasure coding allow users to break large volumes of data into bite size chunks, and disperse it over several different server nodes, and often times, several different geographic locations.  As data is needed, it is rapidly re-compiled and distributed as needed.
  • Raise your hand if you absolutely love to wait for your video content to load.  (Silence.)  The fact is, no one likes to see the status bar slowly creeping along, while you’re waiting for zombies, your futbol club, or the next big singing sensation to show up on the screen.  Because object storage technologies are able to support super high bandwidth and millions of HTTP requests per minute, any customer looking to distribute media is able to allow their customers access to content with superior performance metrics.  It has a lot to do with the network, but also with the software managing the data behind the network, and object storage fits the bill.

These are just two of the considerations, and there are many others, but object storage becomes an interesting technology to consider if you’re looking to get content or media online, especially if you are in the telecom or media space.

Want a real life example? Check out how our customer RTL II, a European based television station, addressed their video streaming challenge with object storage.  It’s all detaile here in this case study – “RTL II shifts video archive into hyperscale with HP and Scality.”  Using HP ProLiant SL4540 big data servers and object storage software from HP partner Scality, RTL II was able to boost their video transfer speeds by 10x! 

Webinar this week! If this is a space you could use more education on, Scality and HP will be hosting a couple of webinars this week, specifically around object storage and content delivery networks.  If you’re looking for more on this, be sure to join us – here are the details:

Session 1 (Time-friendly for European and APJ audiences)

  • Who:  HP’s big data strategist, Sanjeet Singh, and Scality VP, Leo Leung
  • Date:  Wed, Apr 8, 2015
  • Time:  3pm Central Europe Summer / 8am Central US
  • Registration Link

Session 2 (Time-friendly for North American audiences)

  • Who:  HP Director, Joseph George, and Scality VP, Leo Leung
  • Date:  Wed, Apr 8, 2015
  • Time: 10am Pacific US / 12 noon Central US
  • Registration Link

And as always, for any questions at all, you can always send us an email at BigDataEcosystem@hp.com or visit us at www.hp.com/go/ProLiant/BigDataServer.

And now off to relax and watch some TV – via streaming video of course!

Until next time,

JOSEPH
@jbgeorge

Categories: big data, Cloud Computing, hadoop, Innovation, open source, openstack, Tech Tags: , , , , , , ,

Purpose-Built Solutions Make a Big Difference In Extracting Data Insights: HP ProLiant SL4500

October 20, 2014 Leave a comment

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

@jbgeorge

Categories: big data, Cloud Computing, E-Progress, hadoop, Innovation, open source, openstack, Tech Tags: , , , , ,

NOW AVAILABLE: The Dell Red Hat Cloud Solution, powered by RHEL OpenStack Platform!

April 16, 2014 Leave a comment

.

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

 

 

Categories: Cloud Computing, Innovation, open source, openstack, Tech Tags: , , , , , ,