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
Highlights from the 2012 Hadoop World
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Had a great time at last week’s Hadoop World, so wanted to write up a few of my thoughts from the event.
- This year’s Hadoop World was the best attended to date – I believe I heard the attendee number to be at 2500 vs 1400 last year! It’s great to see this kind of growth among the community considering there were only 500 attendees just four years ago.
- In some similarities to what I’m seeing in the OpenStack community, this conference seemed to boast more from the “user” ranks as opposed to just developers as in the recent past. It speaks volumes to the general adoption that Hadoop is seeing in the market.
- Dell, the company I work for, and our Ecosystem Partner Datameer hosted a networking event for a number of folks at Hadoop World at the prestigious Circo NYC restaurant – great food and a great time with some innovative Hadoop implementers. Got to really get indepth how real people are implementing Hadoop in their enviornments today. Appreciate those that took the time out to attend, and for those who missed out, see you next time!
- Cloudera announced their beta project called “Impala”, which allows users to perform real-time queries of their data, a feature that a number of Hadoop users have been anticipating. According to Cloudera, Impala can process queries up to 30 times faster than Hive / MapReduce – very cool, and I look forward to checking it out.
- Finally, Dell made an announcement about our donation of “Zinc”, an ARM-based server concept to the Apache Software Foundation, with support from our partner, Calxeda, where we see ARM infrastructures as an interesting technology for Hadoop environments. The donation includes hosting and technical support for the Apache community. and we’re hosting the server concept at an Austin-based co-location. The Apache Hadoop project has actually performed more than a dozen builds within the first 24 hours of the servers’ deployment. (You can check out the full press release here to learn more.)
All in all, Hadoop World is another hit! It was a great event overall and I look forward to next year’s conference.
To learn more about the Dell Apache Hadoop Solution and more about what Dell is doing in this space, visit us at www.Dell.com/Hadoop.
And if you want to chat about how Dell can help you with your Hadoop initiative, drop me an email at Hadoop@Dell.com.
Until next time,
JOSEPH
@jbgeorge
Dell @ Hadoop World 2012: Experts, Solutions, and Networking Event
- Date: Tuesday, October 23, 2012
- Time: 6:30 – 8:30 p.m. EST
- Place: Circo NYC, 120 W. 55th Street, New York, NY 10019, (212) 265-3636, circonyc.com
- Circo: offers upscale Italian fare built upon a foundation of signature Tuscan recipes from the kitchen of Maccioni matriarch Egidiana and prepared by Executive Chef Michael Galata. The menu is served in a lively, sophisticated setting reminiscent of the old-style European circus tents which inspired the restaurant’s name.
If you’re interested in joining us, be sure to RSVP with Dianna Doan (ddoan@datameer.com) ASAP. There are only a few spots left, so be sure to RSVP now.
I’ll be there, so I hope to see you too.
Looking forward to a great week!
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
Highlights from the Open Source Business Conference 2012
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Last week I had the pleasure to head (back) to San Francisco to spend a few days with other open source believers at this year’s Open Source Business Conference. I was there on behalf of Dell, the company I work for.
Here are some of my thoughts from the sessions / keynotes I sat in on this past week.
- Jim Whitehurst of Red Hat spoke at a keynote and highlighted how the innovation that will be built on IaaS is where the revolution will reside, and that the role vendors will play in this new open source friendly enterprise will focus more on support and services.
- There was a great open source panel with personnel from Yahoo, Warner Music, Blackduck, Acquia, and NorthBridge that talked through real use cases at Yahoo and Warner, plus feedback on their annual open source survey which talked through the rise of open source adoption in the enterprise, how quality and cost is driving that, and how many companies are viewing open source software as a starting point for projects now, rather than an alternative option.
- HP’s Biri Singh talked through their cloud strategy including their tiered strategy of Iaas + ecosystem + marketplace. Turns out they’re using quite a bit of open source as they are building out their public cloud with focus on web services at scale.
- A panel on “Amazon vs the world”, panelists from Canonical , Eucalyptus, and Citrix talked about open private cloud with the backdrop of Amazon’s dominance as a public cloud provider. AWS API compatibility came up a lot, as well as the need to productize open source technologies more. Some opportunities that were highlighted included the need to have vendors who know more than just software, but also the “wiring” of actual working systems, and the importance of staying open as we are just starting to see adoption by the enterprise.
- CloudScaling hosted a great session on why open cloud is winning – how internet companies drove cloud technologies and how they were built with open source, the differences between the “Enterprise IT cloud” and the “Next Gen IT cloud”, and how “no lock-in” + flexibility + scale are the key tenets of open cloud.
Obviously there was a lot more at the event that I was not able to get to – You can check out a few of the presentation slides at https://www.eiseverywhere.com/ehome/31601/50199/?&
If you were out there last week, be sure to leave a comment with your thoughts.
I enjoyed the few days out there – looking forward to the next open source event – likely in San Fran again. 🙂
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
Play Ball! Hadoop Players Sponsor Big Data Event in Chicago
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What does data analytics have to do with baseball????
Well actually, quite a bit. Moneyball anyone?
(If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. A true story adaption about Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s using intense number crunching to build a solid baseball team in a smaller market, competing with bigger markets – and bigger salaries.)
The Technology
Last week, I had the pleasure of representing Dell (the company I work for), as we joined Intel, Cloudera, and Clarity to meet with a number of customers at the Ivy League Baseball Club across from Wrigley Field, right before the Cubs – Cardinals game. It was great to talk to customers who were using Hadoop, as well as those that were just learning about the technology.
The presentation delivered by all four companies focused on the Dell Apache Hadoop Solution, a powerful packaged solution that features
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A reference architecture featuring Intel technology
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A set of software which includes Cloudera’s CDH distribution (with option to upgrade to Cloudera Enterprise), along with Dell’s innovative Crowbar software framework to enable easy provisioing and management
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Services provided by a combination of Dell, Cloudera, and Clarity, to provide our customers with deployment, support, and consulting services
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The Experience
Even more impactful than the presentation was the more 1:1 time after the presentation, where many users and newbies shared stories, experiences, best practices, etc. Got to hear about a lot of the struggles around “going it alone”, and enthusiasm that Dell and our partners were delivering a solution that would make that a bit simpler.
Here’s a sampling of some of the topics that came up.
Why should I care about big data / hadoop?
Here’s the thing: you have data. It’s in your sales tracking system, from your website traffic, from your social media outlets, in your customer support databases, and more. And not only do you have data, you have A LOT of data. But here’s the power of data. Your company has strategic objectives, customer strategies, and product plans. Data gives you insight into how to best spend your resources, where to focus your product development, where your customers are buying your products, and what problems they are encountering. This enables your business to make intelligent decisions to better satisfy your customers.
I already have a data warehousing solution – what’s the benefit of hadoop?
Many analytics solutions today require data to be in a format that adheres to the standards of a relational database (aka structured data). This is fine for data that conforms to this format. However, a lot of the new data that is available to us is not formatted in that manner – this is referred to as unstructured data. Unstructured data includes data types, such as audio, video, graphics, log files, etc. Hadoop as a technology handles unstructured data very well, allowing for analysis of those types of data. Additionally, a number of the traditional enterprise level analytics solutions are building hadoop connectors to allow for hadoop processed data to be utilized by the enterprise tool set. Finally, as data scales, using an open source based technology like Hadoop makes things very cost efficient.
How does the Dell Apache Hadoop Solution help me with hadoop?
Before this solution was made available, many of our Dell customers came to us asking, “If Dell was going to build a hadoop solution, how would you design it?” And this was how we started down the path of hadoop. What we discovered was many customers had pockets of hadoop projects in their companies, but progress was at a crawl. Many of the issues were around infrastructure design, deployment, and overall general help around the technology. And that is the basis for the Dell Apache Hadoop Solution – making hadoop accessible, quick, and simple to deploy from bare metal and get to a functional hadoop cluster asap. We’ve enabled many of these customers to go from a science experiment to a productive Hadoop instance very quickly, and provide them the consulting and education they need to maximize its benefit.
You can learn more about what Dell is doing with Hadoop at www.Dell.com/Hadoop or you can drop me an email at Hadoop@Dell.com.
The Game
For those of you not interested in sports, you can now tune your TV’s off – about to talk baseball for a bit.
As far as the game went, it was a doozy. I have ties to Chicago, so I was rooting for the Cubs. 
- The Cubs were up 1-0 most of the game until the top of the 8th when Cardinal Matt Holliday knocked out a 2 run homer
- Trailing in the bottom of the 9th, Cubs first baseman Bryan Lahair hit a homer to tie it up 2-2, and take us into extra innings
- Here’s where the fireworks really began!
- Bottom of the 10th
- Cubs LF Tony Campana gets on base with a single
- Campana then tries to steal 2nd and barely makes it
- Cardinals coach Matt Matheny did not agree and made a federal case out of it with the 2nd base umpire
- And out goes Matheny – ejected!
- Cardinals walked Lahair
- With two men on base, Cubs LF Alfonso Soriano gets a single and drives Campana home for the 3-2 win!
- Prior to this, the Cardinals had beaten the Cubs in the LAST THIRTEEN SERIES between the two clubs. With this win, that streak has been broken.
Great game, great crowd, great partners! Thanks to everyone who came out. I look forward to the next one. 🙂
Until next time,
JBGeorge
@jbgeorge
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
The JBGeorge Tech Blog 