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OpenStack’s First Year: How a Committed Community Made a Difference
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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
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For those of you who don’t know, I’m a senior cloud strategist for Dell in our Cloud Solutions group, and I’m also the business / marketing lead for Dell’s OpenStack initiative.
We’ve been incredibly busy working on all things OpenStack, so I wanted to provide a bit of an update on where we’ve been, and where we’re going.
Last summer, Dell was one of a few vendors such as Intel, Citrix, and a few others, that got together and supported the fledgling new OpenStack movement founded by Rackspace and NASA.
(The ONLY hardware solution provider that had the vision to so I should add.)
Since then, we’ve been active in the community, working with partners, and helpng customers on real OpenStack engagements.
- Dell’s been an integral part of all three OpenStack Design Summits to date – sponsoring portions of the events, leading discussions on architecture and design, providing hardware for install fests, and meeting with partners and customers.
- Crowbar anyone? We’ve led the way in an operational model that starts with bare metal provisioning but provides a methodology for managing your evolving OpenStack instance.
- Developed the popular technical whitepaper “BootStrapping OpenStack Clouds” authored by Dell’s own OpenStack celebrities Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus, as well as contributions from Rackspace OpenStack celebrity Bret Piatt.
- Numerous lightning talks, OpenStack / Crowbar demos, and working with a number of partners like Rackspace, Citrix, Opscode, and others in their OpenStack initiatives
It should be clear that Dell’s a believer in what the OpenStack community is doing, and we are committed to being a part of the community, providing expertise where our core competencies are. It’s been that way since we started back in July of last year.
So what’s the latest?
- Did you know customers have already started working with Dell on getting OpenStack clouds in their environments?
That’s right – our involvement since the beginning puts us on the short list of community partners that have the most history with OpenStack, so we have a functional reference architecture, Dell developed Crowbar software, and cloud services that can work for customers today. (Info at the end of this blog entry on how you can learn more about working with Dell to get real live OpenStack clouds in your environment.)
In fact, check out one of our customers, Cybera, publicly blogged about getting OpenStack running on Dell PowerEdge C technology. (Link to Cybera’s blog at the end of this entry – very deep technical info.)
- Dell’s OpenStack Installer, better known to the community as #Crowbar, is coming along nicely! When we announced the existence of Crowbar earlier this year, we were clear that our intention was to contribute it to the open source community. We are well on our way there. We’ve already submitted our blueprint to the OpenStack governance body for Crowbar as a cloud installer (more on that here from Rob Hirschfeld).
And here’s a quick snapshot of our latest work on the Crowbar UI that Rob posted recently.
(What? No more plain white background? That’s right – we’ve got game. 🙂 )
Dell Crowbar
- The final comment I’ll make is that we see this summer as an important time for OpenStack – Cactus is out, Diablo is around the corner, partners are joining the community daily, and customers are getting excited. More and more of our customers are finding out HOW REAL OpenStack, and are getting on board.
Dell is going to continue to be a mover and shaker in OpenStack, so keep an eye out on Dell as we prepare to make our next big move in OpenStack.
Head back here often to stay up to date, and you can also follow myself and other Dell OpenStack leads on Twitter – @jbgeorge, @zehicle, @barton808, and others.
Here’s to the summer of OpenStack!
More info:
- Dell’s OpenStack website (where you can get the “Bootstrapping OpenStack Clouds” technical whitepaper) – http://www.Dell.com/OpenStack
- To talk to someone about becoming a Dell OpenStack customer – OpenStack@Dell.com
- Dell customer Cybera’s blog on “Running OpenStack in Production” – http://www.cybera.ca/tech-radar/running-openstack-production-part-1-hardware
- Dell’s Cloud Evangelist’s blog – www.bartongeorge.net
- Dell’s Cloud Solution Architecht (and OpenStack expert) Rob Hirschfeld’s blog – www.RobHirschfeld.com
Until next time,
JOSEPH
@jbgeorge
Cybera, OpenStack, Rackspace Cloud Builders and Dell
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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.
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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
Opscode announces Private Chef and Hosted Chef
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Interesting news at the Velocity conference this week.
Opscode today announced their release of Hosted Chef, where Opscode offers their Chef capabialities “as a service”. Additionally, Opscode announced Private Chef, which is essentially Chef delivered as an appliance on premise.
Chef is an important part of what Dell is developing as part of our Crowbar tool that is being developed for OpenStack. By leveraging Chef cookbooks and recipes, and even contributing some of our own, it allows us to drive the operational model that we see as an important avenue to cloud technology.
What’s Crowbar? You can google or twitter it (#crowbar) to see what people in the know are saying, but at a basic level, it allows user to deploy an MULTI-NODE OpenStack cloud on bare metal Dell PowerEdge C servers in a matter of minutes. But it also offers BIOS configuration, RAID configuration, network discovery, and a number of other great benefits. If you’ve been to a recent cloud event or the last OpenStack Design Summit, you may have seen our live demo of it.
It’s just one of the many cool things we’re doing at Dell to better enable our customers to get to the cloud sooner rather than later, and to leverage OpenStack as a powerful cloud platform.
I’ve written about Dell’s OpenStack solution and Crowbar a lot, so you can check out my blog history for more. Or if you’d like to chat about it drop me a line at OpenStack@Dell.com.
These offerings certainly come at the right time for a market seeking some real cloud answers – congrats to our pals over at Opscode!
More info on the new offerings:
- Hosted Chef – http://www.opscode.com/hosted-chef/
- Private Chef – http://www.opscode.com/private-chef/
- The full press release – http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/opscode-delivers-cloud-infrastructure-automation-to-the-enterprise-123801144.html
Until next time,
JBGeorge
@jbgeorge
VIDEO: #Dell and #Citrix discuss #OpenStack at Citrix Synergy 2011
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Sameer Dholakia, VP of Marketing at Citrix, and I had a chance to visit with the VM blog team while we were at Synergy 2011 last week, and we talked about OpenStack, Project Olympus and how Dell and Citrix are helping move the OpenStack movement forward.
Some key items we touch on:
- The history of OpenStack, where Dell and Citrix are pioneer community partners
- Citrix’s announcement of Project Olympus, which include be a distribution of OpenStack
- Core competencies that both Dell and Citrix bring to the OpenStack community
- How OpenStack fits into Dell’s mantra of open, capable, and affordable.
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You can also read David Marshall’s Virtualization Report article on InfoWorld that details more about Dell, Citrix, OpenStack, and Project Olympus at https://www.infoworld.com/d/virtualization/citrix-commercializes-openstack-project-olympus-550?page=0,0
Learn more at www.citrix.com/olympus and www.dell.com/openstack.
You can also email me at OpenStack@Dell.com.
Enjoy!
Until next time,
JOSEPH
@jbgeorge
Citrix Synergy 2011: Day 2 – Simon Sez!
Hello (again) from San Francisco – for the last time this week!
I’ll be heading back to Austin tomorrow, but it was great being here in California for a few days, and being a part of what was happening at Citrix Synergy 2011.
Day 2 started a bit slow, but Simon Crosby certainly got us back on track.
Simon Crosby on stage at Citrix Synergy
Here are the highlights:
- DJ Solomon was running music before the session and at the after party – I gotta say I was impressed. I’m not a big club beat guy, but this was good tunage.
- Citrix Partner Awards: Gluster – Best Partner Solution for Accelerating Cloud and Best in Show! App-DNA wins best partner solution for desktop transformation, and Abiquo wins best partner solution for virtual datacenters.
- After the Citrix Partner Solution Awards, Simon Crosby took the stage – I’d been looking forward to this – Simon never fails to provide surprise and insight.
- It should be obvious, but a lot of people still don’t get this – virtualiztion is not the same thing as cloud. Does virtualization have a place in cloud? Yes. Can you evolve from a highly virtualized environment to a cloud? Yes. But there is a purer way taken advantage of all the inherent characteristics of cloud (elasticity, mutli-tenancy, etc) by designing and building cloud from the ground up – something that platforms like OpenStack offers. (Check out the whitepaper at www.Dell.com/OpenStack to learn more about that design methodology.)
- OpenStack will help drive what we need in the cloud – getting key vendors together to figure out and build the cloud out right. – Simon Crosby
- To delight (users) and to protect (enterprises) – that is the mission of IT – Simon Crosby
- Interesting analogy from Simon: private cloud vs private cloud similar to driving your own car vs flying in a commercial plane – we drive our own cars, have control, etc – commercial airlines focus on building in process so that air travel is safe and reliable. Interesting fact – the FAA was created by the airlines to help ease people’s fear of flying by implementing standards and a governing body.
- Enterprises are seeking economics, elasticity, and pay-as-you-go from the cloud. – Simon Crosby
- Our consumer choices are increasingly impacting our workplace – Simon Crosby
- Roughly 100% of users violate their company’s security policy to get their job done – apps, public cloud access, etc. It’s important that we as an industry recognize that and leverage it for progress.
- Tarkan Maner, CEO of Wyse – wow, quite a captivating speaker. Was quite comfortable making a number of claims about thin clients and the future of computing, a number of which I’m not in agreement with (there is now no need for thick clients, etc), but overall, I enjoyed his address. Some key takeaways include cloud recommendations: start working toward hybrid cloud, build based on policies, develop to open standards, ensure the right and evolved IT skills are in place, and put users before infrastructure.
- Also learned a new phrase – “FInT this.” = Facebook, Linked In, Twitter. Do any of you actually say this?
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- Train at Citrix Synergy!
Zynga CTO Allan Leinwand also presented today speaking about their zCloud – they went from concept to production in 6 months, and can provision 1000 servers within 24 hours now. They are all about “scale fast or fail fast.” Nice to see that we as a group are starting to understand this notion. Nice quote to the crowd during his discussion: “Some of you might be playing our games right now.”
- Also got a chance to interact with friends in the press as well as users who wanted to know more about OpenStack and Dell’s role in Project Olympus and its Early Access Program. You can also drop me an email at OpenStack@Dell.com if you want to learn more.
- And to top it all off – Train in concert at the Synergy afterparty!
The twitterati was in full swing as well – check out #CitrixSynergy.
Citrix fans – it’s been fun – see you next year!
Until next time,
JOSEPH
@jbgeorge
Citrix Synergy 2011: Day 1
- Welcome to Citrix Synergy 2011!
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Hello from San Fran!
Boy, what a day at Day 1 of the Citrix Synergy event. I’m kicking back at the Serrano Hotel after a long day of meeting, greeting, networking, and learning at they event. Made a lot of new friends today, and got to touch base with a lot of old acquaintences.
I had a lot of high hopes for the conference this week. And the keynote got it off to a rocking start.
I was particularly interested in the OpenStack announcement, but there was a ton of great announcements and demos today. Also had some great meetings with the press today since Dell was a part of the announcements.
Here are some of the highlights I found interesting…
- First off, the OpenStack news – Citrix announced “Project Olympus” which would include a Citrix distribution of OpenStack and a cloud-optimized version of XenServer. There’s an early access program that customers can engage in to work with Citrix, Dell, and Rackspace to get things kicked off there. Check out more at my blog on it here.
- Google did a pretty cool thing by doing a demo with the Citrix crew on stage, and then proceeded to give away about 100 Chromebooks to keynote attendees. Unfortunately, I was not one of them.
- Citrix CEO Mark Templeton did a great job of pitching a nice connected story of BYO-ThreePC – Personal Cloud, Private Cloud, and Public Cloud.
- Citrix showcased a couple of new new NetScaler products – Cloud Gateway to helps in orchestrating web and windows apps, and Cloud Bridge to connect cloud data, directory, web, and apps between public and private clouds.
- Great demos on the new and improved Citrix Receiver. Lots of nice UI updates, drag and drop, etc. And features are translated into the administration side of things as well. It was also cool to see Android apps running in Windows via Citrix Receiver. Things are becoming seamless….
Some great quotes:
Live from Citrix Synergy 2011...
- Citrix’s mantra = “Whatever, whenever, wherever” – I like it. (Also heard a lot of “any, any, any”.)
- “Don’t encrypt the laptop – encrypts the data.”
- Consumerization is a major force and will force changes in IT
OK, well that’s all I’ve got in me for tonight – there was a ton more – feel free to comment about items you found interesting.
I’ll be back tomorrow with another update.
Until next time,
JOSEPH
@jbgeorge
One Giant Leap for Cloud: Citrix, Dell, and Rackspace Step Up with OpenStack
Last July, when the world learned about OpenStack for the first time, it was clear that it needed a group of partners to share the vision for OpenStack’s potential – open, standards based, and a platform for cloud innovation.
And there were partners those who stepped up.
Dell (my employer), Citrix, and others joined Rackspace and NASA, and committed to what they foresaw as a force in cloud. This was a critical juncture in OpenStack’s evolution – industry heavyweights had to be visionary at this stage, while OpenStack was still developing as a technology and as an initiative.
(I’m proud to say that Dell was the only hardware solutions vendor who committed to the OpenStack initiative right from the beginning.)
Fast forward to almost a year later, and OpenStack’s pioneer partners are once again stepping up to help drive OpenStack as a technology platform and further the OpenStack community.
Today, Citrix is announcing Project Olympus, a new cloud infrastructure product based on OpenStack, which will include a certified version of OpenStack as well as a cloud optimized version of XenServer.
And to help drive this, Citrix is announcing the launch of an Early Access Program, with support from Dell and Rackspace and a host of other partners in the OpenStack community, allowing customers to get – you guessed it – early access to Olympus.
(Read the entire announcement here – http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/news/news.asp?newsID=2311980)
At Dell, “Open, Capable, Affordable” is our mantra, and we view certified distributions of open source code as an important part of adoption. It provides customers with peace of mind knowing that a company like Citrix is behind them as they themselves step up to OpenStack. And Citrix is a company we all know and respect, and one that many of us regularly depend on as a software provider – Xen, XenServer, XenDesktop, NetScaler, and on and on.
With this announcement, it’s important that we not gloss over what we’re seeing happening here in the OpenStack community.
It’s not that these key vendors are just supporting the OpenStack movement…
They’re participating in it.
And, yes – it’s a big deal.
This isn’t an announcement of some new consortium based on OpenStack – this is an announcement about key technology leaders doing what they do best to advance an initiative we believe in. All of the companies mentioned have teams dedicated to developing OpenStack, contributing in technical conversations, learning about how customers can benefit from it, and driving the business of the open source cloud platform.
- Citrix is focusing its strengths and core competencies to help enable customers in the software stack via this new distribution and cloud optimized XenServer.
- Rackspace has launched an entire business unit to OpenStack installation, training, and support by way of Rackspace Cloud Builders.
- Dell’s OpenStack team (of which I’m a part) has been leading the way in bare metal deployment of multi-node OpenStack clouds with Crowbar, and an operational model to base full OpenStack solutions on. (You may have seen our live demos at Cloud Connect, SXSW, and the OpenStack Design Summit.)
And that’s the difference. No one is watching from the bench – these guys have been in since the beginning and are living it daily.
We, as the Openstack community, believe we need an open alternative, believe in OpenStack, and believe it is going to change how we develop, build, and run the cloud. And each of us brings our core competencies to the table to help mature the technology, enabling this community to grow and thrive.
And this is a great time for YOU to get involved in OpenStack as well. Check it out at www.openstack.org and get involved.
If you’re learning more about Project Olympus, check out the Olympus webpage at http://www.citrix.com/olympus.
If you’re interested in learning more about Dell and OpenStack visit www.Dell.com/OpenStack or email us at OpenStack@Dell.com.
Kudos to Citrix on Project Olympus, as well as to all of us in the OpenStack community, as we continue to drive this initiative forward.
I’m actually here in San Francisco at the Citrix Synergy conference this week, and I hope to be blogging on the happenings going on. If you’re here as well, I’d be interesting in hearing your thoughts on OpenStack, the announcement, and how you can participate as well. Contact me via Twitter and let’s chat. I’m @jbgeorge – try not to be distracted by the incredibly handsome profile picture. 🙂
Until next time,
JOSEPH
@jbgeorge
Learn more:
- Today’s Citrix announcement
- The Citrix Olympus website
- Barton George – Dell’s Cloud Evangelist on today’s news
- Rob Hirschfeld – Dell Cloud Architect on today’s news
- The OpenStack website
- Dell’s OpenStack website (with link’s to Dell’s OpenStack whitepaper – “Bootstrapping OpenStack Clouds”)
The “Open” Trend in Cloud…
"Yes We're Open!"
C’mon – all the cool kids are doing it…
Going “open” that is.
How many announcements have we seen in the last few months having something to do with open technology when it comes to the cloud space? With a great mix of business benefits AND customer / end user benefits, going open is certainly the latest trend.
I think this is a great and overdue market direction – standards are needed in this space, and I’m hopeful that this level of vendor response will help get us there. Additionally, its important that we understand that open technology, while enabling users, should also benefit vendors, so that they can continue to invest in and support open products.
Here’s a sampling of all the fantastic-ness.
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OpenStack
OpenStack
This one is near and dear to my heart since I’m the OpenStack business lead at Dell. But my view is that OpenStack really kicked off this season’s “open” trend. Announced last July, it’s an open source cloud platform that has gained serious momentum with over 60 vendors in the community and quite a few developers world wide. With the latest release of their code base (codenamed Cactus), and their recent Design Summit (at the Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara – where else?), service providers and large enterprises are taking a serious look at OpenStack as a viable cloud solution. (Learn more at www.OpenStack.org. Also shameless plug for www.Dell.com/OpenStack.)
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OpenCompute
Facebook helped launch this initiative as they strove to build a low cost, yet highly efficient computing infrastructure. Partnering with other industry stalwarts like Dell and Rackspace, Facebook opened up the specs on the efficient servers that make up their environment, in an effort to encourage other companies to build energy efficient infrastructures. (Learn more at www.opencompute.org.)
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VMware Cloud Foundry (Open PaaS)
With its aquisition of the SpringSource Java development framework, and of RabbitMQ, the cloud messaging technology, VMware makes a bold move into the cloud space by unveling Cloud Foundry as an open source “Platform as a Service”. Focused on Java application developers , Cloud Foundry supports Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, and Rails, and allows developers a quick and easy way to get development platforms up and available.
Another plus – my good buddy Dave McCrory (@mccrory) is helping drive this initiative at VMware. 🙂
(Learn more at www.cloudfoundry.com)
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openshift.redhat.com/app
OpenShift
Speaking of open PaaS, Red Hat announced its OpenShift Platform as a Service today. Their focus is to produce exportable workloads that can be used via private cloud or public cloud, such as Amazon. OpenShift will support Java, PHP, Python, and Ruby. Ironically, the open source is not yet open source, but will be shortly.
(Learn more at openshift.redhat.com/app.)
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OpenFlow
How can I continue without mentioning OpenFlow? As many experts agree, the network will be one of the most critical components to cloud success. Created to help drive innovation in networking, a number of vendors are investigating ways to add OpenFlow as a feature to their networking portfolio. Dell, Nicira, and others are some interesting names in this space. I’m hopeful we’ll hear some interesting news about commercial networking providers and OpenFlow as Interop kicks off next week.
(Learn more at www.openflow.org.)
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So what do you think should be next here? Do you feel open sourcing cloud technologies advance us as an industry?
Drop me a line or leave a comment – would love to hear your thoughts.
Until next time.
JOSEPH
@jbgeorge
Dell + Equinix + Rackspace = OpenStack Demo Environment
Good day, cloud fans!
A big day for open source cloud technology – Dell, Equinix and Rackspace have announced OpenStack demo environments being stood up at Equinix colo facilities, allowing interested users to check out what’s so great about OpenStack.
Essentially, it can be a great first step to investigating OpenStack cloud technologies, which can lead to a follow on proof of concept for user specific workloads and apps, whether on customer premises or at an Equinix or Rackspace data center.
Cool, right?
Inquiring minds can read the press release in it’s entirety at http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110330005532/en/Dell-Equinix-Rackspace-Collaborate-Launch-OpenStack-Cloud.
Or if you’re like me, you can just watch this video:
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And what’s this about a Dell developed OpenStack installer that can enable bare metal provisioning of OpenStack clouds?
That’s right. Now we’re talking.
At the Cloud Connect event a few weeks ago, Dell, along with OpsCode, were able to demonstrate LIVE deployements of multi-node OpenStack clouds onto bare metal Dell PowerEdge C servers in less than 30 minutes!
Check out one of Dell’s architects, Greg Althaus (who happens to be a co-author of the Dell OpenStack whitepaper), talk about this tool at Austin’s SXSW recently:
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Yes, yes – I’m the marketing guy he’s talking about…
It’s a really exciting time in the cloud space! Our community is really starting to see ways that the cloud can drive smarter, more effiicent practices.
If you’re interested in learning more, reach out.
Here’s how you can get started:
- Download the Dell OpenStack technical whitepaper from www.Dell.com/OpenStack. It details hyperscale design of OpenStack on Dell PowerEdge C server technology.
- Drop us a line at OpenStack@Dell.com to learn more about how Dell can get you started on OpenStack asap.
What are your thoughts on the OpenStack news? Feel free to share a comment below.
Are we having fun yet?
Big time. 🙂
Until next time,
JBGeorge
www.jbgeorge.net / @jbgeorge
The JBGeorge Tech Blog 