Archive
Rock The [OpenStack] Vote!
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Well its that time of the year again!
(I guess that’s fairly a open ended statement – I could be talking about the beginning of the school year, the start of football season, or the summer solstice.)
I’m talking about getting your votes in for sessions at the OpenStack Summit coming up in Hong Kong this November!
If you’re a member of the OpenStack community, you should have received a note this past week requesting your help to select which sessions should be represented at the Design Summit and User Conference this fall.
Now, let me be clear – this should not be a popularity contest on presenters (like me) or vendors (like Dell, the company I work for), but rather where you see need for certain experts to discuss a topic that is important to the OpenStack development community or to the OpenStack user community.
Yours truly has submitted a few sessions as well for your consideration – check it out:
- Remain Calm and Deploy On! (or How the Crowbar Community Is Innovating for Success with OpenStack)
In this session, I’m planning to highlight the importance of deployment technologies in implementing OpenStack as a cloud option, and how we’ve approached it by developing our own open source project, Crowbar. I’ll be joined by Crowbar community contributors Intel (who are working on Crowbar capabilities for Intel Hadoop and Intel TXT security) and SUSE (who have incorporated a SUSE skinned version of Crowbar into their SUSE Cloud product). I expect it will be a great interactive session with the goal of educating the audience on how Crowbar can enable them to get going faster with OpenStack.
- Enterprise Hypervisors: How Three Companies Are Making OpenStack with Hyper-V a Reality
Earlier this year, we announced Dell taking an active role in bringing true Hyper-V hypervisor support to OpenStack. To provide an update on progress there, I’m proposing a topic to present jointly with peers at SUSE, who we’ve partnered with on the Dell SUSE Cloud Solution, powered by OpenStack, and Cloudbase, who have been pioneers in Hyper-V enablement in OpenStack, to talk through how customers can implement a Hyper-V based OpenStack solution using technology from all three companies. There has been solid work to date, including Crowbar integration, so I expect this will be a lively one!
- Build in OpenStack Security with Crowbar and Intel TXT
I can’t tell you how excited I am about how the Crowbar project has evolved over the years. It started as an answer to the problem of “how do I deploy OpenStack on bare metal?” but has now emerged as a broad software platform for innovation covering cloud, hadoop, and other use cases. One telltale sign of progress to me is how others are leveraging Crowbar, and cloud security is definitely an interesting area. This session is one where I’ll present with my friends at Intel to talk through how Intel has developed Crowbar functionality for their Intel TXT secure resource pool solution. Expect a lot of Q&A on this one.
And that’s it!
Appreciate you voting with the community’s best interest in mind!
And you can learn more about the coming OpenStack Summit here – http://www.openstack.org/summit/openstack-summit-hong-kong-2013/
Until next time!
JBG
@jbgeorge
NOW HIRING: Cloud and Big Data Solution Marketing Rockstars
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As Dell (the company that I work for) continues to service customers in all facets of OpenStack and Hadoop implementations, we are beginning another season of growth on the Revolutionary Solutions team.
The Dell Revolutionary Solutions Team delivers the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution and the Dell Apache Hadoop Solution, leads the Crowbar open source project, and manages the Emerging Solutions Ecosystem Partner Program that includes a number of key partners such as Suse, Inktank, Cloudera, Datameer, and Pentaho.
We are looking for a variety of engineers and presales teams, but I will focus on the product management and marketing roles in this post.
Technical Product Managers – Product managers to be technical SMEs (roadmaps, requirements, etc) on partner products in the cloud and big data spaces, most notably OpenStack and Hadoop, but could also be focused on other emerging solutions spaces – Link to Job Posting
- Product Marketing Managers – Marketing experts to own and lead go-to-market strategy and deliverables in the cloud and big data spaces (marketing strategy, sales enablement, etc). Again, this would certainly cover our OpenStack and Hadoop solutions today, but could also focus on future emerging solutions spaces. – Link to Job Posting
- Open Source Community Manager / Evangelist – Community oriented professionals with strong networks, strong social media presence, and an ability to bring collaborators and customers together to work on common goals – Link to Job Posting
- Marketing Directors – Experienced people managers to drive business objectives, product vision, and go-to-market strategy, specifically in the areas of Product Management and Product Marketing – Link to Job Posting
In our experience, the best candidates
- have a track record of ownership
- have a techincal background
- are experienced in their discipline
- are participants in cloud, big data, virtualization, or similar emerging technologies
Pass it on to a friend or apply yourself – I look forward to hearing from you!
Until next time,
JBGeorge
@jbgeorge
Dell Cloud News: Hyper-V for OpenStack, Public Cloud Partner Program
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Two pieces of important cloud news coming out of Dell (the company I work for) today:
- Dell to Enable Hyper-V and Windows Server 2012 Support for OpenStack
Dell today announced it will enable Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V as a viable hypervisor choice for the OpenStack cloud platform. This development, which is the first instance of a leading technology vendor enabling Windows Server Hyper-V hypervisor on OpenStack for private clouds, will give customers additional flexibility and choice to run OpenStack workloads within their existing Windows Server environments.
More info here.
- Dell to Deliver Public Cloud through Partner Ecosystem
Dell is launching the Dell Cloud Partner Program to deliver public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) through an ecosystem of partners. Acting as a single-source supplier, Dell will offer customers a choice of vendors and technology, freedom from lock-in to a single platform or pricing model and a central point of solution integration and control. Sales of Dell’s current in-house multi-tenant public cloud IaaS will be discontinued in the U.S. in favor of best-in-class partner offerings.
More info here.
Both of these announcements highlight key tenets for our cloud strategy.
- First and foremost, our customers come first when it comes to new products, solutions, and services – they are the most important element in enabling the vendor lanscape understand where the priorities should be.
- We will continue to collaborate and learn from our customers as we develop products, solutions, and services in the cloud space. It is part of our DNA – plain and simple.
- Though our tactics evolve, our commitment to enabling our customers with cloud technology remains constant. Customers are finding success in cloud when partnering with Dell, and we’ll continue to keep that our mission.
- Specifically with OpenStack, our commitment to enabling the innovative cloud technology and community remains as solid as ever. We have been vocal advocates since Day 1 (something no other hardware solutions vendor can claim), and we have no intentions of slowing down.
From the Data Center Solutions (DCS) team, who have built and enabled some of the biggest public clouds in the world, to the Dell Revolutionary Solutions Team, who have been early entrants into the OpenStack and Hadoop spaces, and to Dell’s open source community in Crowbar, we’ve proven our commitment to innovation and customer success.
That is what we are about.
And don’t expect that to ever change.
Until next time,
JBGeorge
@jbgeorge
NOW HIRING: Dell’s Revolutionary Cloud and Big Data Team Expands
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We’re growing!
The Revolutionary Cloud and Big Data Team at Dell (the company I work for) is looking to expand our team of rockstars, so we’re putting the word out. Specifically we’re looking for architects, engineers, developers, and I’m looking to hire a few more senior product managers to join my team of subject matter experts.
Just for context, we’re the team that has taken to market the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution, the Dell Apache Hadoop Solution, and the Dell Crowbar software framework and open source project.
And if you’re a rockstar in any of those spaces, we’d like to talk to you.
SPOILER ALERT – If you’re interested in talking to us about a technical spot on our team, you can email us your info and resume at OpenStack@Dell.com or Hadoop@Dell.com.
What is this team about?
A few years ago, the Dell Data Center Solutions team came into being with a mission of servicing the biggest hyperscale environments in the world, which included many of the market’s top cloud providers. It has succeeded in its mission in dominating the density optimized space (check out more on that here), and in fact, just shipped it’s ONE MILLIONTH SERVER.
An extension of DCS’s mission soon became clear – as many customers were looking to accelerate into spaces like cloud and big data, providing them integrated solutions would ease their implementation of these technologies. And so our Revolutionary Cloud and Big Data Solutions team was born – to deliver integrated solutions based on cutting edge technologies like OpenStack and Hadoop (and more), as well as innovative Dell projects like Crowbar, in an effort to enable customers to grow and thrive in their businesses with our products, innovation, and expertise.
Who are we?
The team at Dell is made up of a number of people, like myself, that you’d recognize from OpenStack and Hadoop circles – folks like Rob Hirschfeld, Greg Althaus, Kamesh Pemmaraju, and others. We all come from a variety of backgrounds – some from big companies in the technology spaces and many from startups – we happen to have quite a few entreprenuers on our team! And we try to service our customers in the best way possible – agile development processes, open source friendly, community oriented, etc.
What are we trying to do?
Our mission is to develop and deliver HW+SW+Services solutions to market that will enable our customers to be successful. Clear and simple.
Here’s a sampling of what our team has done over the course of our existence:
- The first hardware solutions vendor to support OpenStack
- Released the first HW+SW+Services OpenStack solution to market – the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution
- Launch of open source project “Crowbar” to fill the void of an automated bare metal OpenStack provisioner
- Released HW+SW+Services Apache Hadoop solution to market – the Dell Apache Hadoop Solution
- Launch of the Emerging Solutions Ecosystem Partner Program to enable our customers by incorporating some of our best in breed partner technologies into our solutions, which includes Datameer, Pentaho, enStratus, Mirantis, and Canonical, with more to come
- Launch of the Emerging Solutions Platform Partner Program to enable our customers by delivering solutions focused on specific workloads and target markets
In addition, we’re big believers in the community – we regularly hold hackfests to help move these communities forward, lead community meetups in Austin and Boston working with other key vendors that co-sponsor with us (you may be surprised), are regularly active in IRC, skype discussions, conference breakout sessions, and more.
It’s a fast-paced, customer focused, ever evolving group and its a great place to deliver tanglible, difference making solutions to customers.
It’s not for the faint of heart, but it’s DEFINITELY for the mover and shaker.
Who we want to hear from
We’re looking to expand in a number of areas, but specifically we’re looking for technical talent
- Developers / QA
- Technical Product Managers and Strategists
- Architects and Technical Leads
If I’ve piqued your interest, drop me a note and your resume at OpenStack@Dell.com.
Look forward to hearing from cloud / big data / open source rockstars.
Until next time,
JOSEPH
@jbgeorge
Dell Cloud Happenings This Week…
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Just wanted to drop a quick blog to provide a central area on what events Dell has going on in the cloud space this week.
Here we go…
WHIR Webinar – Wed, June 20th
What: Dell / Intel / Morph Labs WHIR Webinar
Title: “Proven Innovation to Reduce Data Center OpEx by 40%”
When: Wednesday, June 20, 2012 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EDT
Who: Deania Davidson (Dell), Naveen Bohra (Intel), Winston Damarillo (Morphlabs)
More Info: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/506707474
Boston OpenStack Meetup – Thu, June 21st
What: Dell and Red Hat co-sponsor this month’s Boston OpenStack Meetup
When: Thursday, June 21, 2012, from 6:30 – 9:30PM
Where: The auditorium located at 85 Wells Avenue Newton, MA
Agenda: OpenStack Swift, Quantum
More Info: http://www.meetup.com/Openstack-Boston/events/67737262/
Austin OpenStack Meetup – Thu, June 21st
What: Dell and Opscode co-sponsor this month’s Austin OpenStack Meetup
When: Thursday, June 21, 2012, from 6:30 – 9:30PM
Where: The Austin Tech Ranch
Agenda: OpenStack Foundation with Foundation guest speakers Mark Collier, Jonathan Bryce, and Lauren Sell
More Info: http://www.meetup.com/OpenStack-Austin/events/67989692/
Look forward to seeing a big turnout at each of these! See you there.
Until next time,
JBGeorge
@jbgeorge
Start Your Engines: Dell Hosts OpenStack Deploy Day / Hack-a-thon!
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Earlier this year, Dell (the company I work for) hosted an OpenStack deploy day, and we had great participation from users and developers from all around the world.
We’ll, we’re doing it again.
One week from today – May 31, 2012 – Dell will be hosting a world wide Essex deploy day, and we’re inviting everyone to be a part. It’s a great way for users of any level to deploy OpenStack with Crowbar and get a better understanding of how the Essex release of OpenStack works.
As before, the focus of the day will be on automating deployment of the latest release of OpenStack, specifically through Dell’s Crowbar software framework (www.Dell.com/Crowbar). It will be an all day, world wide event that will engage all types of OpenStack fans – developers, operators, users, and more.
We’re already getting a strong response from the OpenStack vendor community as well. Along with Dell, you’ll see Suse, Mirantis, enStratus, and others in person and on Skype to work on Essex, whether its advanced topics, bug fixing, and even 101 sessions for newcomers.
All the details you need are on our Github site – https://github.com/dellcloudedge/crowbar/wiki/OpenStack-Essex-Deploy-Day
As an added bonus, we also have a few physical locations to hack in person at as well – Austin, Boston, and New York. If you’re in one of these locales, be sure to RSVP and stop by. (And if you’re interested in hosting a location for the hack-a-thon, drop us a line and we’ll tell you how.)
If you have any questions about details, logitistics, or how Dell is enabling our customers with OpenStack, drop us a line at OpenStack@Dell.com.
See you there!
Until next time,
JBGeorge
@jbgeorge
More info:
- All the event details – https://github.com/dellcloudedge/crowbar/wiki/OpenStack-Essex-Deploy-Day
- Info for the Austin, TX location – http://www.meetup.com/OpenStack-Austin/events/64399052/
- Info for the Boston, MA location – http://www.meetup.com/Openstack-Boston/events/65206122/
- Info for the New York, NY location – http://www.meetup.com/OpenStack-New-York-Meetup/events/65887462/
- More info on the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution at www.Dell.com/OpenStack
- Feel free to send any questions to OpenStack@Dell.com
Two Dell-Sponsored Austin Cloud Meetups in Five Days
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Hola!
Wanted to let the Austin cloud enthusiasts, professionals, and fans know that Dell (the company that I work for) will be hosting a couple of user group gatherings this week…
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The Austin OpenStack Meetup
WHEN: Thu, May 10 6:30pm
WHERE: Austin Tech Ranch (9111 Jollyville Rd #100, Austin, TX)
WEB: www.meetup.com/OpenStack-Austin
This meetup has been a staple of the Austin OpenStack community, with Dell having spearheaded its start in October of last year.
We’ve had a number of great companies join Dell in sponsoring this monthly meetup at Austin’s Tech Ranch, including Rackspace, Suse, Canonical, and even HP. 🙂
This month, we’ve got Puppet Labs joining Dell as a joint sponsor of the meetup. On the docket for discussion:
- Important topics, events, news, etc from the OpenStack Design Summit and Conference held in San Francisco the week of Apr 16
- Discussion on the recently announced OpenStack Foundation – we hope to have someone from the foundation development team present
- A review of DevStack as a community development platform
Should be loads of fun – come hungry and thirsty – loads of pizza and cokes. (BTW people, let’s at least TRY to make a dent in the salad this time.)
All the details you need to know are at www.meetup.com/OpenStack-Austin.
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The Austin Cloud User Group
WHEN: Tue, May 15, 6pm to 8pm
WHERE: Pervasive SW North Austin HQ (12365 B Riata Trace Parkway. Austin, TX 78727)
WEB: www.meetup.com/AustinCloudUserGroup
Dell has been a sponsor of this user group before, and a number of us attend regularly – we’re glad to be back to talk about some of the things going on with Dell’s public cloud. Specifically, our Dell cloud services team will be hosting and talking about the goings on at Dell in the cloud hosting space.
You’ll see Dell’s cloud evangelist, Stephen Spector, as he touches on
- Discussion and demos of Dell’s vCloud hosted offering
- Demos of processor intensive applicataions in a public cloud setting
- Demos of a few common applications running on Dell’s cloud
If you’ve ever seen Stephen speak, you know you’re in for a treat. For those who don’t know, Stephen is the former Community Manager for the OpenStack community, so we’re ecstatic to have him here at Dell!
Again, come hungry and thirsty – loads of pizza and cokes.
All the details you need to know are at www.meetup.com/AustinCloudUserGroup.
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OK, that’s it – be sure to make it out to at least one of these meetups, and we’ll give you a shout out if make it to both. 🙂
Until next time,
JBGeorge
@jbgeorge
Thoughts on the Spring 2012 OpenStack Design Summit
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It’s been a couple of weeks since the OpenStack summit took place in San Francisco. It was a great one, and I’m finally getting some time to put down a few thoughts about this year’s show.
The company I work for, Dell, chose to sponsor again, which was great. That would make five OpenStack conferences in a row, including the first one in Austin before OpenStack was announced.
It was great to see all the familiar faces, some with new companies. And there was a number of new faces, which is a great indicator of the progress the OpenStack movement is making. In fact, in the first keynote delivered by Jonathan Bryce, he asked for a show of hands of those who had never been to an OpenStack Summit before – I ballparked it at about 25% of the room as new!
Some interesting takeaways from the conference:
- The user community showed up
The topic of users has been coming up at our local Austin OpenStack meetup often, and I was glad to see a number of inquisitive users come to the show to learn about using OpenStack in operation. Users are an important part of our communit’y’s evolution, and it was good to see that group out in force to have their voices heard.
- HPC as a cloud use case
In a number of user sessions, high performance computing came up as a use case on OpenStack. This has not been a space where I would have expected HPC to come up as a technology, but in thinking about it, it makes sense. Similar to other spaces, the HPC communities are looking for more flexible, extensible platforms to build their systems on.
- More user adoption of Crowbar
Dell has been at the forefront of bare metal provisioning of multi-node OpenStack clouds since the advent of OpenStack, and every conference featured Dell doing bare metal deployments live. It was great to hear about a number of methods of deployment that users were using, but also enlightening to know about all the users using Crowbar that we weren”t even aware of. (It’s an open source community so that happens. 🙂 ) We’re commited to continuing to drive Crowbar as a deployment / mgmt / configuration framework, and it’s good to see the community adopting it as a platform.
Continuing interest in the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution.
Lots of good work is being done all over the community – software, services, and public cloud featuring OpenStack. But I was happy that Dell was still clearly focused on being a central provider of OpenStack as an on-premise, cloud solution, whether private cloud for IT, or a public cloud option for service providers to offer. Along with the announcement of the Emerging Solutions Ecosystem, which features a number of Dell partners like Canonical, enStratus, and Mirantis, there were a number of great discussions on how customers could get going on OpenStack asap.
And there’s a ton more that I’m not covering – the foundation, user group formation, hypervisor talk, etc, etc, etc – I’ll let you do that.
Drop me a comment about some of the things that you took away from the summit. There was a lot to be excited about.
Already looking forward to the next summit in the fall.
Until next time,
JBGeorge
@jbgeorge
More info:
- Info on the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution – www.Dell.com/OpenStack
- Info on the Dell Crowbar open source software framework – www.Dell.com/Crowbar
- Info on the OpenStack movement – www.OpenStack.org
- Email us if you have questions – OpenStack@Dell.com
More News on the OpenStack Foundation: Participating Members
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At the Oct 2011 OpenStack conference in Boston, leaders in the community, namely Rackspace, made the announcement that steps were being taken to transition the open source cloud technology to a foundation format.
Today, more news has come out regarding details on this move, and some of the key players in the newly forming foundation.
The Platinum Members listed include
- AT&T
- Canonical
- HP
- IBM
- Nebula
- Rackspace
- Red Hat
- Suse
The Gold Members listed are made up of
- Dell (the company I work for)
- Cisco
- ClearPath Networks
- CloudScaling
- DreamHost
- ITRI
- Mirantis
- Morph Labs
- Netapp
- Piston Cloud Computing
- Yahoo!
In addition to these partners, there are a number of individual partner options available, allowing anyone interested in being a part of the foundation that option.
Dell has long been known for our approach to customer solutions: Open, Capable, and Affordable. So naturally, we are glad to see progress in this area of the community and initiative. In fact, here’s what our VP and GM of Server Development had to say on the topic:
“We believe the OpenStack Foundation is a significant step in the evolution of the OpenStack initiative and for open source cloud innovation”, said Forrest Norrod, VP & GM of Dell Server Platforms. “Dell has always been about open – open standards, systems and solutions promote innovation and give our customers choice. We look forward to participating in the OpenStack Foundation as part of our continued efforts to empower and grow the open source cloud ecosystem.”
This is only the first step, and the Foundation leads are looking to get to an agreed to set of bylaws and framework by the third quarter of 2012. If you’d like to learn more about the mission and framework of the foundation, check out the OpenStack Wiki here.
And if you’d like to learn more about Dell is doing in the OpenStack space, including details on our on-premise OpenStack offering, the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution, feel free to visit us at www.Dell.com/OpenStack. You can also drop me a line at OpenStack@Dell.com.
This is certainly an exciting day for OpenStack, as the movement continues to mature and grow.
PS – for any of you that are in / near the Austin area, we’ll be having our April edition of the monthly OpenStack meetup TONIGHT hosted by Dell, and sponsored this month by Suse. Everyone’s welcome, so be sure to stop by the Tech Ranch tonight – more info at http://www.meetup.com/OpenStack-Austin.
Until next time.
JBGeorge
@jbgeorge
THIS JUST IN: The Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution Expands Globally
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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
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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
The JBGeorge Tech Blog 