The JBGeorge Tech Blog

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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