Archive
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
OpenStack’s Bexar Release!
On Thursday, OpenStack announced the second drop in the OpenStack code – the Bexar release!
(And it’s pronounced “bear”.)
(The other acceptable pronunciation is “bare.”)
For those of you keeping track, the first release was Austin, the second release was Bexar, and the next release is codenamed Cactus.
(Can you see the pattern?)
(That’s right, every code name has an “a” in it.)
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Dell's Rob Hirschfeld discussing cloud bootstrapping to packed house...
To celebrate this release, OpenStack sponsored an event in Santa Clara that I was able to attend. Great lightning talks (5 min max) by a number of individuals in the community, including my pal Rob Hirschfeld, who spoke about bootstrapping the OpenStack cloud in a hyperscale environment. (Check out his blog at RobHirschfeld.com, and follow @zehicle on Twitter.)
So let’s get back to the release here – it includes things like
- IPv6 support (which is just in time, since we’ve now RUN OUT of IPv4 addresses!)
- Support for the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor (already supported KVM and XenServer)
- A new image discovery service called Glance
- much more documentation
Check out this eWeek article where Barton George and I gave our thoughts on this release: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Cloud-Computing/OpenStack-Cloud-OS-Project-Rolls-Out-Bexar-Edition-New-Partners-234666/
Here’s a quote from yours truly:
It’s time to take the “learning to the next level” by putting Dell servers with OpenStack in customer environments to “see real-life use cases,” Joseph George, senior cloud-solutions strategist at Dell Data Center Solutions, told eWEEK.
And I mean it – let’s start piloting this stuff!
Who’s with me?
I’ll put my Dell hat on and say that Dell is actively seeking customers interested in doing a proof of concept of OpenStack (aka POC) – we’ve been testing it, and understand how to get you going quick so you can prove it out.
Am I proud to be working for the only systems solution vendor that has been publicly participating in the OpenStack initiative since the beginning of OpenStack?
Heck yeah.
In fact, Dell DCS has a great cloud solutions portfolio – drop me a line / comment if you’re ready to get a POC going – we’ll get it rolling.
OK, back to our regularly scheduled programming…
Oh, wait. I guess I’m done.
Don’t forget Sunday is Superbowl Sunday – between the commercials, and the actual game, there’s something for everyone. Here’s to a high scoring, low injury game!
And thus begins the season of prayer in hopes the NFL and the Players Association work out a collective bargaining agreement, so we can have a 2011 season.
Amen.
Until next time,
JOSEPH
@jbgeorge
www.jbgeorge.net
Cloud Driving Change
Those of you that follow me here at the JBGeorge Tech blog or on Twitter or in other ways (stop stalking me!) know that one of my passions is how technology can make a difference in the world. It can be through technology leaders advocating philanthropy, tech innovation leading to medical advances, or a local IT person donating their tech talent to improve school safety.
To that end, I was thrilled to be invited to a meeting that took place in San Francisco yesterday.
On Monday, I, along with a few other select individuals involved in the OpenStack open source cloud initiative, had the distinct privelege of meeting with Aneesh Chopra, CTO of the White House, to discuss cloud computing, open source, and how open source cloud (specifically OpenStack) can help America grow and thrive.
A number of key representatives from various OpenStack participants were present from Dell, Rackspace NASA, Citrix, AMD, and others to contribute to the discussion. There was a lot of great conversation, which included an overview by the OpenStack team from Rackspace, and a myriad of perspectives from the various attendees. Specific problems were discussed such as security, standards, and impact on other areas like healthcare. Much was discussed about OpenStack in particular, and how its evolution can help spur on the American economy.
What are your thoughts on how cloud can better society? How does it impact education, healthcare, or small business? How can it make us healthier, economically more stable, and overall better citizens? Let’s think beyond operating systems and PaaS / SaaS – what can cloud do to help drive positive change?
Regardless of where you fall politcally, it’s a great time to be in technology. The current administration views tech and cloud computing as a key driver to advancing America and rightly so.
And they’re looking to us to help figure out ways to do that.
That’s a real cool thing. Let’s pitch in.
I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts. Feel free to drop me a comment or reply on Twitter @jbgeorge.
Until next time,
JBGeorge
www.jbgeorge.net
@jbgeorge
OpenStack Design Summit – Day 1 Review
Wanted to provide some visibility to the great stuff happening at the OpenStack Design Summit at the Weston Center in San Antonio.
- Intention is to draft requirements and specs for the January release of OpenStack
- ~300 attendees total – 90 companies and 12 countries represented
- Companies in attenance include Dell, Citrix, RightScale, Cloudkick, Canonical, NASA, and many others
- Technical and business tracks running touching on topics like evolution of the datacenter, Bexar release plans, and many others
- Lots of Twitter action via #openstack
- Discussion of cloud deployments from the hardware perspective, the software perspective, the services perspective
- Lots of hallway conversations between companies – networking-a-rama!
- Great party at Rackspace HQ last night
- Pictures Day 1 at from the event at http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinhole/tags/openstack/ and http://www.openstack.org/blog/2010/11/openstack-design-summit-day-1-pictures/
Will try to provide an update tonight after today’s festivities as well.
Some personal thoughts that have been ruminating lately, and are becoming confirmed in my mind this week.
- No matter what side of the fence you’re on, cloud will need to eventually settle at a model that allows users to evaluate needs, business strategy, etc, then decide HOW MUCH to put in the hosted / public cloud, HOW MUCH to put in the private cloud (whether on premise or of premise), and then implement a BURSTING capability.
- Services are going to be a key part of broader migration to the cloud, especially at the enterprise level
- We, as a group, are doing better on this, but we’re not spending enough time understanding and designing the networks that will drive our clouds. More thought, discussion, and debate need to be done on this topic asap.
For the latest happenings at the Design Summit, search Twitter for #openstack (direct link = http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23openstack). You can also learn more about OpenStack at www.openstack.org.
Also, if you’re at the event, and interested in seeing the Dell PowerEdge C servers that are running at the event, and will power the InstallFest later this week, find me, tweet me, etc, and I’ll get you into the server room.
Until next time,
JBGeorge
www.jbgeorge.net / @jbgeorge
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