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THIS JUST IN: Dell, SUSE, Microsoft, and Cloudbase Collaborate to Enable Hyper-V for OpenStack-based SUSE Cloud 2.0
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(Note this is a cross-post of a blog I posted on the official Dell blog site, the company I work for. The original blog is at http://is.gd/Ie6s10.)
(Also note the press release this blog relates to is at http://is.gd/W7e1BZ.)
Dell and SUSE: refining the art and science of OpenStack cloud deployments
The Dell OpenStack cloud solutions team is excited to unveil our newly enhanced Dell SUSE Cloud Solution, powered by OpenStack. This newly enhanced cloud infrastructure solution makes multi-hypervisor clouds a reality. It is now possible to operate data center cloud environments with nodes running KVM, Xen, and Hyper-V hypervisors.
So, what is so new here?
These enhancement to the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution are delivered via Dell solution integration with SUSE Cloud 2.0 – an enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution for building private clouds now with the ability to support Hyper-V nodes installed by Crowbar.
We continue to listen to our customers, and understand their desire for choice. Through this solution we are providing customers a Microsoft hypervisor choice in addition to KVM. With support for multiple hypervisors, SUSE Cloud 2.0 provides extended flexibility so you can optimize cloud workloads on whatever hypervisor delivers the ideal operational and performance benefits in your environment. This flexibility is a key to efficiency in today’s hyper-heterogeneous data centers. After all, isn’t this what cloud computing is all about?
What exactly is the Dell SUSE Cloud Solution?
Simply put, this solution is an end-to-end private cloud solution, with the following core components:
- SUSE Cloud 2.0: SUSE’s enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution, with an integrated installation framework based on the Dell-initiated Crowbar open source project, enabling organizations to rapidly deploy OpenStack private clouds. This OpenStack distribution delivers all the integrated OpenStack projects including Nova, Swift, Cinder, Neutron, Keystone, Glance, and Dashboard.
- SUSE Studio: The award-winning SUSE image building solution enables enterprises to rapidly adapt and deploy applications into the SUSE Cloud image repository or public clouds.
- SUSE Manager: Manages Linux workloads and enables the efficient management, maintenance and monitoring of Linux workloads across physical, virtual, and public or private cloud environments.
- Dell platforms and reference architecture: The Dell SUSE Cloud Solution includes a validated and certified reference architecture with Dell PowerEdge C6220 and R720/R720XD server systems and Dell networking infrastructure.
- Dell and SUSE Professional services, support and training: Enterprise services for complete assessment, design, deployment and ongoing support, provided through a cooperative support model leveraging the combined capabilities of Dell and SUSE.
In addition to enhancing the core cloud software platform, the Dell and SUSE teams have delivered enhancements to the Dell Crowbar Operations Platform to rapidly instantiate hardware and deploy these multi-hypervisor environments.
Dell Crowbar is the robust open-source installation framework that simplifies, standardizes and automates the setup of OpenStack multi-hypervisor clouds. Dell and SUSE are actively developing and refining Crowbar, so you can fully configure your environment, automatically discover and configure new hardware platforms, and simply deploy the complete cloud software stack — all in a repeatable manner, in a fraction of the time required of manual efforts.
SUSE Studio and SUSE Manager are also available from SUSE, so you can quickly assemble applications into your image repository and easily monitor and maintain your deployed applications across your cloud resources.
Why consider open source solutions for your cloud?
Open source clouds allow you to innovate on open platforms and frameworks to accelerate your time-to-market and time-to-value. By leveraging community building and collaboration with the OpenStack project, you can gain direct control over your cloud infrastructure and the software you use to manage it – this is why OpenStack is the fastest growing open source project on the planet. Further, with OpenStack you have the opportunity to develop and refine our own features rather than wait for commercial vendors, who may or may not release the features you want when you want them.
Bottom line: OpenStack is faster, flexible, more cost efficient, and can be tuned for your environment.
How does OpenStack fit into Dell’s Cloud strategy?
Dell’s Cloud strategy is focused on three areas: enabling private cloud, deploying multi-cloud management and supplying cloud builders. OpenStack is key to our first pillar of enabling private clouds and allows us to provide customers with flexible, open cloud solutions so they can eliminate vendor lock-in and build solutions that best suit their needs.
Four Weeks, Four Webinars: A Deep Dive into the Dell SUSE Cloud Solution, Powered by OpenStack
Starting on September 26th, Dell and SUSE are hosting a webinar series for system administrators, DevOps engineers and solution architects. Please join us to get a step-by-step walkthrough of the joint Dell and SUSE OpenStack-based private cloud solution.
Shout out for OpenStack Summit
To learn more and Dell and SUSE solutions for OpenStack Clouds live Come and visit Dell at OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong. It’s coming fast – See you there!
Until next time.
JOSEPH
@jbgeorge
Rock The [OpenStack] Vote!
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Well its that time of the year again!
(I guess that’s fairly a open ended statement – I could be talking about the beginning of the school year, the start of football season, or the summer solstice.)
I’m talking about getting your votes in for sessions at the OpenStack Summit coming up in Hong Kong this November!
If you’re a member of the OpenStack community, you should have received a note this past week requesting your help to select which sessions should be represented at the Design Summit and User Conference this fall.
Now, let me be clear – this should not be a popularity contest on presenters (like me) or vendors (like Dell, the company I work for), but rather where you see need for certain experts to discuss a topic that is important to the OpenStack development community or to the OpenStack user community.
Yours truly has submitted a few sessions as well for your consideration – check it out:
- Remain Calm and Deploy On! (or How the Crowbar Community Is Innovating for Success with OpenStack)
In this session, I’m planning to highlight the importance of deployment technologies in implementing OpenStack as a cloud option, and how we’ve approached it by developing our own open source project, Crowbar. I’ll be joined by Crowbar community contributors Intel (who are working on Crowbar capabilities for Intel Hadoop and Intel TXT security) and SUSE (who have incorporated a SUSE skinned version of Crowbar into their SUSE Cloud product). I expect it will be a great interactive session with the goal of educating the audience on how Crowbar can enable them to get going faster with OpenStack.
- Enterprise Hypervisors: How Three Companies Are Making OpenStack with Hyper-V a Reality
Earlier this year, we announced Dell taking an active role in bringing true Hyper-V hypervisor support to OpenStack. To provide an update on progress there, I’m proposing a topic to present jointly with peers at SUSE, who we’ve partnered with on the Dell SUSE Cloud Solution, powered by OpenStack, and Cloudbase, who have been pioneers in Hyper-V enablement in OpenStack, to talk through how customers can implement a Hyper-V based OpenStack solution using technology from all three companies. There has been solid work to date, including Crowbar integration, so I expect this will be a lively one!
- Build in OpenStack Security with Crowbar and Intel TXT
I can’t tell you how excited I am about how the Crowbar project has evolved over the years. It started as an answer to the problem of “how do I deploy OpenStack on bare metal?” but has now emerged as a broad software platform for innovation covering cloud, hadoop, and other use cases. One telltale sign of progress to me is how others are leveraging Crowbar, and cloud security is definitely an interesting area. This session is one where I’ll present with my friends at Intel to talk through how Intel has developed Crowbar functionality for their Intel TXT secure resource pool solution. Expect a lot of Q&A on this one.
And that’s it!
Appreciate you voting with the community’s best interest in mind!
And you can learn more about the coming OpenStack Summit here – http://www.openstack.org/summit/openstack-summit-hong-kong-2013/
Until next time!
JBG
@jbgeorge
NOW HIRING: Cloud and Big Data Solution Marketing Rockstars
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As Dell (the company that I work for) continues to service customers in all facets of OpenStack and Hadoop implementations, we are beginning another season of growth on the Revolutionary Solutions team.
The Dell Revolutionary Solutions Team delivers the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution and the Dell Apache Hadoop Solution, leads the Crowbar open source project, and manages the Emerging Solutions Ecosystem Partner Program that includes a number of key partners such as Suse, Inktank, Cloudera, Datameer, and Pentaho.
We are looking for a variety of engineers and presales teams, but I will focus on the product management and marketing roles in this post.
Technical Product Managers – Product managers to be technical SMEs (roadmaps, requirements, etc) on partner products in the cloud and big data spaces, most notably OpenStack and Hadoop, but could also be focused on other emerging solutions spaces – Link to Job Posting
- Product Marketing Managers – Marketing experts to own and lead go-to-market strategy and deliverables in the cloud and big data spaces (marketing strategy, sales enablement, etc). Again, this would certainly cover our OpenStack and Hadoop solutions today, but could also focus on future emerging solutions spaces. – Link to Job Posting
- Open Source Community Manager / Evangelist – Community oriented professionals with strong networks, strong social media presence, and an ability to bring collaborators and customers together to work on common goals – Link to Job Posting
- Marketing Directors – Experienced people managers to drive business objectives, product vision, and go-to-market strategy, specifically in the areas of Product Management and Product Marketing – Link to Job Posting
In our experience, the best candidates
- have a track record of ownership
- have a techincal background
- are experienced in their discipline
- are participants in cloud, big data, virtualization, or similar emerging technologies
Pass it on to a friend or apply yourself – I look forward to hearing from you!
Until next time,
JBGeorge
@jbgeorge
Dell Cloud News: Hyper-V for OpenStack, Public Cloud Partner Program
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Two pieces of important cloud news coming out of Dell (the company I work for) today:
- Dell to Enable Hyper-V and Windows Server 2012 Support for OpenStack
Dell today announced it will enable Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V as a viable hypervisor choice for the OpenStack cloud platform. This development, which is the first instance of a leading technology vendor enabling Windows Server Hyper-V hypervisor on OpenStack for private clouds, will give customers additional flexibility and choice to run OpenStack workloads within their existing Windows Server environments.
More info here.
- Dell to Deliver Public Cloud through Partner Ecosystem
Dell is launching the Dell Cloud Partner Program to deliver public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) through an ecosystem of partners. Acting as a single-source supplier, Dell will offer customers a choice of vendors and technology, freedom from lock-in to a single platform or pricing model and a central point of solution integration and control. Sales of Dell’s current in-house multi-tenant public cloud IaaS will be discontinued in the U.S. in favor of best-in-class partner offerings.
More info here.
Both of these announcements highlight key tenets for our cloud strategy.
- First and foremost, our customers come first when it comes to new products, solutions, and services – they are the most important element in enabling the vendor lanscape understand where the priorities should be.
- We will continue to collaborate and learn from our customers as we develop products, solutions, and services in the cloud space. It is part of our DNA – plain and simple.
- Though our tactics evolve, our commitment to enabling our customers with cloud technology remains constant. Customers are finding success in cloud when partnering with Dell, and we’ll continue to keep that our mission.
- Specifically with OpenStack, our commitment to enabling the innovative cloud technology and community remains as solid as ever. We have been vocal advocates since Day 1 (something no other hardware solutions vendor can claim), and we have no intentions of slowing down.
From the Data Center Solutions (DCS) team, who have built and enabled some of the biggest public clouds in the world, to the Dell Revolutionary Solutions Team, who have been early entrants into the OpenStack and Hadoop spaces, and to Dell’s open source community in Crowbar, we’ve proven our commitment to innovation and customer success.
That is what we are about.
And don’t expect that to ever change.
Until next time,
JBGeorge
@jbgeorge
ONE MILLION: Dell Data Center Solutions (DCS) Ships Millionth Server
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The team at Dell (the company I work for) celebrated a huge milestone last week…
The Data Center Solutions group (aka DCS) officially shipped their millionth cloud server!
As the director of DCS marketing, Drew Schulke, pointed out, DCS’s influence is all around you – “If you used a search engine, updated your status via social media, or generated a map on the internet to get from ‘point A’ to ‘point B’ today, there is a good chance that a DCS server made that possible.” (You can read Drew’s entire blog here.)
As many of you know, I lead a team of product managers and strategists on the Dell Revolutionary Cloud and Big Data team, who focus on areas such as OpenStack and Hadoop, who deliver the Dell Crowbar software framework, and lead the Crowbar open source community.
So what does DCS have to do with our OpenStack / Hadoop / Crowbar team?
Actually quite a bit.
DCS set out to meet the needs of the hyperscale customer, and as it turns out, most of those customers are looking at cutting edge technology trends like OpenStack, Hadoop, and open source toolsets.
In fact, our solutions feature PowerEdge C servers, the density optimized server line that was born out of the work done by DCS, and are being run by our solutions customers on a regular basis as they stand up cloud and big data environments.
So by pulling together integrated HW+SW+Services solutions around OpenStack and Hadoop, leveraging innovative Dell IP like Crowbar and the unique advancements coming out of the DCS group, we’re able to make our customers even more successful – which is what its all about.
Win-win-win!
It’s a great milestone for the innovative DCS team – join me in celebrating this momentus milestone!
Until next time,
JOSEPH
@jbgeorge
More info:
THIS JUST IN: Dell Announces ARM Server Ecosystem and Acceleration Programs
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If you’ve followed some of the technology advances in the processor space, you’ve no doubt heard of the ARM architecture. We’ve seen ARM processors in a number of client devices, but they’ve not been widely adopted for server use due to additional feature needs, performance, and limited software ecosystem.
Well, today, Dell (the company I work for) announced some of the work we are doing behind ARM and ARM-based servers.
ARM, which stands for “advanced RISC machine,” is a 32-bit RISC instruction set architecture developed by ARM Holdings. In the server context, it can allow systems to be deployed at the chip level to reduce space, power consumption and cost.
Dell has been testing with ARM since 2010, and has been working with customers to understand how they could benefit from the ARM architecture, as well as what their expectations were regarding ARM-based servers.
Dell “Copper” ARM-based server
Today, we announced development of “Copper”, an ARM-based microserver, optimized for the current maturity of the ARM server market, which is primarily focused on test / dev and ARM-based technology to test and optimize code. And for this predominant use case, the Copper server is a great fit in terms of size and costwith its lightweight design, low-power-consumption and excellent density.
Dell’s Copper server is specifically designed for this market, with a small acquisition size and price, lower power consumption, and ease of use, and if you’ve followed our open source solution to date, you know that enabling open source development is important to us.
Enabling customers and the ecosystem
Testing to date has found compelling performance per dollar and performance per watt advantages for workloads like LAMP stack based web front ends and Hadoop applications. In that vein, we’ve partnered with TACC, the Texas Advanced Computing Center to help work through workloads, use cases, etc. We are also working with key open source partners like Canonical and Cloudera to help drive this space as well.
And for those who follow our Cloud and Big Data solutions (like the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solutions, the Dell Cloudera Hadoop Solution, and Crowbar), you’ll be happy to know what our team intends to enable ARM in Crowbar as well. It has proven to be a great tool in deploying our solutions on bare metal and managing the overall solutions that we see a great fit for it in the ARM use case.
We’re obviously very excited about this announcement, so I’d welcome you to check out the links on the ARM / Copper announcement at the end of this blog and in the video below.
Until next time,
JBGeorge
@jbgeorge
More info:
- Learn more about what Dell is doing with ARM and the new “Copper Server” – www.Dell.com/ARMserver
- Learn more about ARM (Wikipedia)
- Learn more about Dell and Hadoop – www.Dell.com/Hadoop
- Learn more about Dell Crowbar – www.Dell.com/Crowbar
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
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
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
Round Two: Austin OpenStack Meetup This Week!
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OK, ladies and gents… the first OpenStack meetup was great – let’s do it again!
This Thursday, OpenStack fans around Austin (and San Antonio, and Dallas 🙂 ) will get together at the Tech Ranch to talk all things OpenStack.
This time around, we’ll focus on deployment as it was a hot topic at our last meetup – we’d like to ask all attendees to come prepared with their questions, experiences, stories, best practices, etc to share.
We’ll also open the floor to other OpenStack topics that would be discussed – technical and business discussions – no commercials please! 🙂
We’ll also talk about organizing future OpenStack meet ups.
Here’s all you need to know:
- WHEN: Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 6:30pm
- WHERE: The Austin Tech Ranch – 9111 Jollyville Rd #100, Austin, TX
- REGISTER HERE: http://www.meetup.com/OpenStack-Austin/
- TWITTER: Do you tweet? Then tweet before / at / during / about this week’s Austin meetup! Be sure to use #OSATX in your tweet.
This month, we’re fortunate to have Rackspace sponsor our refreshments at the meetup, so thanks to them!
(If your company is interested in helping sponsor a future meetup, find me at this week’s meetup, and we’ll talk about the details.)
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- The Tech Ranch in Austin
The JBGeorge Tech Blog 