Archive
RoadStack RV: Dell, Rackspace, OpenStack and a Long Stretch of Road…
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This past week marked the end of a nearly three week journey by a few brave souls from Rackspace and Dell, as the two companies sponsored the team to travel to and from the OpenStack Summit in San Fran last week, making Stacker Stops along the way.
A team that included folks like Dell’s Andi Abes and Rackspace’s Wayne Walls, Jordon Rinke, Scott Simpson, and Glen Campbell, finally ended their tour this past Friday, pulling into their San Antonio home base.
The team had quite a lofty mission – make the drive from San Antonio to San Fran, spend the week at the summit, and drive back hitting key cities like Los Angeles, Boulder, Dallas, and Austin. As they drove, they’d code and blog. When they stopped, they spread the good word around the OpenStack open cloud.
(And I hear there was a bit of hijinks thrown in as well.)
We had the pleasure of hosting the RoadStackers when they stopped by the Dell campus in Austin – I had a chance to chat with the guys, so take a look at a few of the 90 second videos we put together…
And yeah – we had a little fun with it – enjoy!
If you want to learn more about Dell is doing in the OpenStack space, including the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution, check out www.Dell.com/OpenStack or drop me an email at OpenStack@Dell.com.
Until next time,
JBGeorge
@jbegeorge
Videos:
- Scott Simpson and I chat about OpenStack Swift – and an upcoming movie?
- Jordan Rinke and I chat about OpenStack and Hyper-V support – and REM cycles on the trip
- Glen Campbell and I chat about his Top 3 important topics at the OpenStack summit – and an unscheduled extension to the RoadStack tour
- Wayne Walls and I chat about what he’s going to do as soon as he gets off the RoadStack RV
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
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
OpenStack meetups in Austin and Boston!
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Just a quick heads up on some OpenStack meet ups coming your way…
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Boston
A shot from our FIRST OpenStack meetup in Austin last month...
This Tuesday, Nov 29, Dell (the company I work for), along with Fidelity, will be sponsoring an OpenStack meetup in BOSTON at 6pm at the Lexington Depot.
Hear from folks actively deploying (or getting close to) on OpenStack clouds.
Partly presentation and mostly discussion (and obviously pizza). 🙂
Sessions should cover the core new features in Diablo: Keystone and Dashboard, as well as deployment strategies (and will touch on Dell’s own Crowbar). Each topic will have a presentation followed by open Q & A.
Time is also reserved for an unconference so come armed with some topics
Meet and eat at 6, then get to cloud stuff at 6:30, and plan to end around 9pm.
Learn more / register at http://www.meetup.com/Openstack-Boston/ – if you attend, be sure to grab some pics and tweet w #OSBOS
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Austin
Last month, my team at Dell hosted the first ever OpenStack meetup in Austin with a great showing of the cloud community in the city. We’re now at over 100 members on the MeetUp, and we want to keep the goodness going.
We’ll be back at the Tech Ranch on Thu, December 8 to have our second Austin OpenStack meetup where the topic (based on last time’s feedback) will be deployment, and a myriad of other topics.
This time around Rackspace will be joining us and sponsoring the food and refreshments for the night.
You can join the group and get details on the Austin meet up at http://www.meetup.com/Openstack-Austin/
Same deal – when you come, take a few pics and tweet with #OSATX.
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What city’s next?
A number of the attendees of the last Austin meetup actually traveled in from a number of nearby cities, so if you’re so inclined, start an OpenStack meetup in your area!
Feel free to drop me a line or catch me at the next meet up if you’re interested in learning how we got started.
See you at the next meet up!
Until next time,
JBGeorge
@jbgeorge
More info on what Dell is doing with OpenStack at www.Dell.com/OpenStack or email me at OpenStack@Dell.com
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TOP TEN: Why You Should Be At Tonight’s Austin OpenStack Meetup
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OK, ladies and gentlemen – the top ten reasons for why you should head out to the Tech Ranch tonight for our first Austin OpenStack meetup.
OpenStack Meet Up Tonight (Thu, 10/27) 6:30pm at Tech Ranch Austin
10. There will be free food.
9. You’ll meet other Stackers and cloud fans in the Austin area.
8. You’ll get a first hand view of OpenStack, Diablo, and Crowbar
7. You’ll get to hobnob with OpenStack rockstars from Dell, Rackspace, Opscode, and other OpenStack supporters. (There are also rumors that Dell’s elusive and wildly handsome director of marketing will be in attendance.)
6. There will be free food.
5. You’ll learn about Crowbar from the people that actually wrote the software.
4. Remember the week-long OpenStack technical trainings that have been happening world-wide over the last month or so? This week, it’s in Austin, so we’ll have a number of out of town guests to meet up with.
3. JBG will provide timely World Series score updates.
2. Live demos. That’s always a crowd favorite.
1. OpenStack is one of the coolest new technology movements out there – this is a great way to dive into OpenStack!
(Oh, and there will be FREE FOOD.)
If you’re planning to head out, be sure to RSVP at http://www.meetup.com/OpenStack-Austin/events/37908242/
You can learn more about Dell’s doing with OpenStack by emailing me at OpenStack@Dell.com or visiting www.Dell.com/OpenStack
See you tonight!
JBGeorge
@jbgeorge
THIS JUST IN: Dell Announces the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution
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On the heels of the one year anniversary of the OpenStack open source cloud operating system – here’s some awesome news…
Dell (the company I work for) announces the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution, the market’s first hardware + software + services OpenStack solution for customers seeking to build out their own OpenStack clouds!
Let’s take a look under the hood, shall we?
Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution
Hardware (Dell PowerEdge C cloud optimized servers)
Built on a reference architecture honed since DAY ONE of the OpenStack movement, the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution offers a hardware configuration featuring cloud optimized Dell PowerEdge C servers. Dell has built cloud infrastructure for some of the biggest names in the world, like Facebook and Microsoft Azure, and have used those learnings to develop the highly dense, power-efficient PowerEdge C servers that the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution has been architected with.
Software (Dell Crowbar deploying and managing the OpenStack cloud platform)
When Dell began testing OpenStack in mid 2010, we were installing it, testing it, blowing it away, reinstalling it, tweaking it, blowing it away, reinstalling it… you get the picture. And it wasn’t trivial. These deployments took considerable time, effort, and expertise, so we developed the Dell Crowbar software framework extending Opscode’s Chef automation, which can deploy MULTI-NODE OpenStack clouds in hours or even minutes, rather than days when done manually. (Anyone remember our team deploying a 6 node Nova and Swift OpenStack deployment in 29 minutes at CloudConnect?) Crowbar enables BIOS and RAID setup and configuration, network setup, deploys open source tools like Nagios and Ganglia for monitoring, and much more.
And hey, we’re a community here, right? So here’s what the OpenStack community has been waiting to hear – Dell has now open sourced Crowbar! We’ve made it available to the open source community via our Github site, which is linked below. My partner in crime, Rob Hirschfeld, goes into Crowbar deep on his blog, so I’ve provided a link to his site below as well. (FYI – we are still working through some of the legal aspects of BIOS and RAID capabilities, but decided to open source the rest of Crowbar while we work it out.)
And speaking of support…
Services (Dell Services + Rackspace Cloud Builders)
After a year of being in OpenStack, we’ve built up some expertise, so Dell Services, along with our partner Rackspace Cloud Builders, will be offering a plethora of services to help you make your OpenStack cloud a reality.
- Consulting
- Deployment
- Training
- Support for the entire solution – HW, Crowbar, OpenStack, etc
- And a host of other services direct from Dell Services
When you get the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution, you can call Dell for support on any aspect of the solution, and we’ll help you figure it out, with our crack support teams, our OpenStack engineers, and our OpenStack partners.
And those are the basics.
Fast. Easy. Now. The Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution
A few more comments….
Let me just say – I am proud that we’ve delivered this solution to market, but even PROUDER to be part of a company had the vision to see the potential of OpenStack on Day One. Yes, that’s a big deal to me.
I’d like to call out a number of partners we’ve worked with to get to this point – Rackspace, Citrix, Opscode, Canonical, Intel, and others – the community is a big deal in OpenStack, and it’s great to have their support in this announcement. I’m also very happy that one of our first Dell OpenStack customers, DreamHost, is a part of this announcement as well with a full case study on how they’re doing OpenStack with Dell. (HINT: they’re neck deep in Crowbar and loving it!)
We plan to celebrate the announcement big time at OSCON, so if you’re here, come by the Dell booth – demos, gear, giveaways, etc. And our breakout session will be on Thursday (10:40am in room E-141) – “Prying Open the Cloud with Dell Crowbar and OpenStack” – Rob will present the deep down details on Crowbar.
(And if you want to get in on the celebration, feel free to tweet the news and your thoughts – be sure to use hashtags #Dell, #OpenStack and #Crowbar…)
So What’s Next?
Time for YOU to start using this. The Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution, Crowbar, all of it. Talk to your Dell rep, emaial us at OpenStack@Dell.com, download Crowbar, start building Crowbar barclamps, discuss it in the forums, etc… and get started building OpenStack clouds with Dell.
More info:
- Dell OpenStack webpage
- Crowbar’s open source repository
- Press Release: Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution
- Rob Hirschfeld
- Barton George
- OpenStack.org
- Partners: Citrix Project Olympus, Rackspace Cloud Builders, Opscode Chef, Canonical, and Intel
Until next time,
JBG
@jbgeorge
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
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
The JBGeorge Tech Blog 