Ubuntu, the Cloud and the Future — Neil Levine

July 27, 2010

After the cloud summit last week at OSCON, I sat down with Neil Levine of Canonical to see what was in store for Ubuntu cloud-wise (Canonical is a partner of ours in our cloud ISV program).  Neil is the VP of Canonical’s corporate services division which handles their cloud and server products.

Here’s what Neil had to say:

Some of the topics Neil tackles:

  • The next Ubuntu release “Maverick Meerkat” and its geek-a-licious launch date: 10.10.10.
  • Look for Maverick to make Eucalyptus even easier to deploy and use.
  • Data processing and data analytics is one of the key use cases in the cloud and Canonical is looking to move up the stack and provide deep integration for other apps like Hadoop and NoSQL.
  • What are some of the areas of focus for next year’s two releases i.e. 11.04 and 11.10.
  • Project ensemble: what it is and what its goals are.

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

My quick spiel on the cloud

July 25, 2010

At OSCON last week I ran into a compadre from a previous life, Fred Kohout.  Fred is now the CMO at UC4, a pure play software automation company, and he, like I, was in Portland to attend OSCON and the Cloud Summit.

At the summit Fred did to me what I’ve done to so many others, he got me on the receiving end of a video camera to talk about where Dell plays in the cloud and how we see the cloud evolving.

You can check out Fred’s blog from the Summit where he posted my video as well as the interview he did with another former compadre, Peder Ulander, CMO at cloud.com.

Don’t touch that dial

If you’re interested in OSCON be sure to stay tuned.  I’ve got four more interviews from the event that I will be posting soon.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

The OpenStack design summit in review

July 22, 2010

Tuesday after the OSCON cloud summit I sat down with Rick Clark over a well deserved beer.  Rick is the chief architect and project lead for the OpenStack compute project that was announced on Monday.

Last week I interviewed Rick on the first day of the inaugural OpenStack design summit and I wanted to catch up with him and get his thoughts on how it had gone.  This is what he had to say:

Some of the topics Rick tackles:

  • How it went engaging a very large technical group (100+) in an open design discussion patterned after an Ubuntu Developer Summit.
  • Some of the decisions he thought would be no brainers, turned out differently e.g. OVF (open virtualization format) and keeping the storage and compute groups separated.
  • Since the summit involved representatives from over 20 companies, some of them competitors, how good were people at putting away their business biases/agendas?
  • How far they got (hint they got requirements from everyone for the first release).
  • They’ve already gotten their first code contributions.
  • How they plan to build a community: actively looking to hire a community manager.   In the meantime its actively growing and in a week they’ve gone from 10 people in the IRC channel to 150 on Tuesday.

Extra-credit reading:

But wait there’s more…

I got back from OSCON last night with a fist full of videos.  In addition to the above, coming soon to a browser near you are the following interviews:

  • Brett Piatt with more OpenStack goodness
  • J.P. Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at BT — Nature doesn’t require SLAs
  • Simon Phipps about his new company ForgeRock
  • Neil Levine, VP at Canonical about what’s in store for Ubuntu.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

OpenStack Compute – talking to the chief architect

July 18, 2010

Rick Clark used to be the engineering manager at Canonical for Ubuntu server and security as well as lead on their virtualization for their cloud efforts.  He’s now at Rackspace and is applying much of what he learned while at Canonical to his new gig as project lead and chief architect of the just announced OpenStack Compute.

Rick talked to me about what he brought with him from Canonical as well as the details behind OpenStack Compute.

Some of the topics Rick tackles:

  • What is the OpenStack Compute project (hint its a fully open sourced IaaS project)
  • Leveraging what Rick learned from the Ubuntu community, including a regular six month cadence.
  • Rick’s goals for design summit: develop a roadmap for the first release, spec out the software and spend the last two days prototyping and hacking.
  • Why they went with the Apache 2 license and why not AGPL?
  • The Rackspace API (NASA had already started to switch from the Amazon API before combing
  • The project’s core principles: open, open, open

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Talkin’ to the project lead of OpenStack Object Storage

July 18, 2010

The first code that is available from the OpenStack project, and its available today, is the code for the storage effort, “Object Storage.”  The man at the technical helm of this effort is Will Reese of Rackspace.  Will’s daytime job is development manager and system architect for Rackspace’s Cloud Files, the source of the code for Object Storage.  Will and I grabbed some time at last week’s design summit and he briefed me on the project:

Some of the topics Will tackles:

  • Object Storage is based on the open sourced code from Rackspace’s Cloud Files.
  • What attracted NASA to Cloud Files (think scale).
  • Rackspace will lead the project to get the community kick started but is looking for the community to take over.
  • Storage and Compute will each have their own tech boards made up of members from Rackspace, NASA and the community.
  • In the second half of the interview Will takes us through a quick overview of the cloud files architecture which is written in python, leverages eventlib, and borrows concepts from memcache and some  key-value stores –>  To learn more, check out Will’s talk at OSCON this Wednesday.

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Introducing OpenStack — an open source cloud platform

July 18, 2010

Today Rackspace and NASA announced OpenStack, an open source cloud platform that they are collaborating on and building a community around.  Last week the inaugural OpenStack design summit was held here in Austin with 20 companies from around the world, including Dell, participating.

During one of the breaks I grabbed sometime with Rackspace’s cloud president, Lew Moorman to learn more about the effort and get his thoughts:

Some of the topics Lew tackles:

  • What is OpenStack (an opensource set of technologies for building clouds…)
  • Why Rackspace decided to opensource their code .
  • How Rackspace got hooked up with NASA and what each brings to the party.
  • Taking Nebula’s core foundation and adding some elements from Rackspace’s side in order to put together a release candidate that should be available to the community this Fall.

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

NASA’s chief cloud architect talks OpenStack

July 16, 2010

At the inaugural design summit for OpenStack, an open source set of technologies for building clouds, Nebula’s chief architect Josh McKenty played a prominent role in leading the assembled folks.  I caught Josh during a break and chatted with him about Nebula and NASA’s role in the newly announced OpenStack project.  Here’s what he had to say:

Some of the topics Josh tackles:

  • What is Nebula (hint: NASA’s, primarily IaaS, cloud computing platform)
  • The history of Nebula and how it morphed from nasa.net.
  • Why NASA wants a cloud – and the importance of having an elastic set of resources.
  • NASA and Nebula’s use of open source and how it has evolved (they don’t simply fling tarballs over the wall anymore and they can use licenses other than the “NASA open source agreement”)
  • A match made in heaven:  NASA has put together a strong compute platform and was looking to building a real object store,  Rackspace had a strong object store and work looking for a new compute platform.

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Cloud Billing and the Subscription Economy

July 15, 2010

A couple of weeks ago I was out in the Bay Area to attend Giga OM’s Structure event.  One of the interesting individuals I met there was Tien Tzuo, CEO and founder of Zuora.  Zuora, which counts salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff as an investor, “bills” itself as the leader in subscription billing and payment solutions.  Here is what Tien had to say:

Some of the topics Tien tackles:

  • Zuroa as the “Salesforce.com for online billing” (they are a hosted SaaS offering with a point and click interface.
  • Their focus on companies that have a recurring subscription based business model e.g. SaaS, cloud, online media…
  • Their launch of Zcommerce for the cloud which provides billing, reoccurring payment capability and subscription management capability for cloud environments.
  • The great variety of pricing and packaging models when it comes to cloud payment: an arrears model, a minimum volume commitment model a pre-pay model etc.
  • The concept of moving from a product-centric society to “The subscription economy,” you see it in transportation, music, computing …

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Cool Article on the Dell/Azure announcement

July 14, 2010

Monday, as part of Microsoft’s big Azure announcement, we announced that we would be both building an Azure appliance, enabling customers to build their own public or private clouds, as well as developing an Azure public cloud at Dell that our customers can use to develop and deploy next generation services on.

There has been a ton of press surrounding this move by Microsoft to broaden the market for Azure, an effort which also includes similar agreements with HP and Fujitsu. Not surprisingly, my favorite article is one by Charles King that came out yesterday in eCommerce Times — Microsoft’s Windows Azure and Dell: Blue Skies Ahead.

Check out these excerpts and you’ll see why :)

Dell is out of the blocks and running with Azure while its rivals are still sorting out their gym bags.

Dell’s cloud efforts tend to be one of the company’s best kept secrets. Some vendors’ continual cloud pronouncements tend to blend into a vuvuzela-like drone, but Dell has simply gotten down to the hard work of building workable commercial cloud and hyper-scale data center solutions during the past three years.

In fact, Dell was the first major vendor to launch a business unit specifically focused on the commercial cloud. By doing so, the company’s Data Center Solutions (DCS) organization has gained invaluable hands-on expertise about the specialized needs of organizations leveraging cloud technologies for applications including hosting, HPC, Web 2.0, gaming, energy social networking and SaaS. That point likely influenced Microsoft’s 2008 decision to choose Dell as a primary infrastructure partner in developing the Azure platform.

Cool stuff!

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

The Dell / Azure Cloud & Appliance

July 12, 2010

Several months ago in the press release that announced our Cloud Solution offerings, there was a particularly cloudy paragraph that talked about Dell’s relationship with Microsoft.  The paragraph ended with the sentence: “Dell and Microsoft will collaborate on the Windows Azure platform, with Dell and Microsoft offering services, and Microsoft continuing to invest in Dell hardware for Windows Azure infrastructure.”  What the heck did that mean?  Well today we can be a bit clearer.

Dell Cloud based on Windows Azure

Earlier this morning at Microsoft’s Worldwide partner conference, the giant of Redmond announced the limited production release of the Windows Azure technology for a select few tech giants.  Dell is one of these and will be taking this technology and creating ourselves a Platform as a service (PaaS) cloud.  We will in turn use this cloud to deliver both public and private cloud services to customers looking to develop and deliver next generation cloud services based on .Net.   This platform will be targeted at enterprise, public, small and medium-sized business customers as well as be used by Dell itself.

But wait, there’s more: Azure in a box

Dell and Microsoft are also working on a Dell-powered Windows Azure platform appliance.  (Don’t let the term “appliance” throw you, you can’t register for this and it really represents 100s or 1000s of servers plus storage and networking).  Dell will be making this turnkey cloud platform available to enterprises to enable them to set up their own PaaS clouds within their organizations.  Dell has a bit of a leg up here since we’ve been working with Microsoft on Azure as the primary infrastructure partner since its launch back in ’08.  We’re simply packaging this “winning combination” and providing it in a turnkey package for internal use by enterprises.

A little context: adding to our cloud portfolio

So how does this fit in with some of the other cloud solutions that we have announced?  At a high-level, Dell is providing cloud solutions to help customers take either an evolutionary approach that makes their existing applications more efficient or a revolutionary approach with new applications written for cloud scale (we actually believe customers will do both).

We have already been working with Microsoft to offer evolutionary cloud services based on Microsoft’s Hyper V platform.  We are now complementing this with a revolutionary Windows Azure appliance.  This turnkey PaaS cloud platform will be in addition to the turnkey PaaS cloud platform that we announced with Joyent.   Whereas the Joyent-based offering, “the Dell cloud solution for web applications” is targeted at folks developing in Java, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails etc. the Azure appliance will naturally be targeted at the .Net world.  BTW we also offer solutions based on VMware Redwood/ Spring, EMC Atmos and BMC among others.

Stay tuned for more!

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

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