“Stacker” Mark Collier gives an OpenStack Update

January 27, 2011

A group of “stackers” (Rackspace employees involved in OpenStack) paid us a visit today here at Dell.  During a break in the meetings I got some time with Mark Collier, VP of Marketing and Business development at Rackspace who has been focused on building up OpenStack.  I chatted with Mark about what’s been going on in this open source cloud project and what’s coming up.  Take a listen:

Some of the ground Mark covers

  • What his involvement in OpenStack has been over the last year.
  • [0:58]  What Rackspace is doing to preserve the openness of the community and how they use the “blueprint” process.
  • [2:32]  What brought Mark and his colleagues to Dell
  • [4:06]  What’s coming up in the project’s next release “Bexar,” which is due next Thursday (Feb 3) e.g. IPv6 support provided by NTT engineers and “Glance” an image registry service similar to Amazon’s AMIs.  The key message is, with this release OpenStack is ready to deploy.
  • OpenStack meet-up in Santa Clara on Feb 3, where Dell software architect Rob Hirschfeld will be talking about our experience/learnings deploying OpenStack in our lab.

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

4 Comments | Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Barton George

My interview on the Windows Azure team blog — The Cloud will go away

January 17, 2011

Earlier this month an interview I did with Robert Duffner, Director of Product management for Windows Azure, went live on the Windows Azure team blog.  Robert asked me a variety of questions about Cloud security, how I see the Cloud evolving, the pitfalls of the cloud, where Dell plays etc.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that my ramblings actually turned out coherent :)   Here is a section from the interview (you can check out the whole piece here):

Cloud computing is a very exciting place to be right now, whether you’re a customer, an IT organization, or a vendor. As I mentioned before, we are in the very days of this technology, and we’re going to see a lot happening going forward.

In much the same way that we really focused on distinctions between Internet, intranet, and extranet in the early days of those technologies, there is perhaps an artificial level of distinction between virtualization, private cloud, and public cloud. As we move forward, these differences are going to melt away, to a large extent.

That doesn’t mean that we’re not going to still have private cloud or public cloud, but we will think of them as less distinct from one another. It’s similar to the way that today, we keep certain things inside our firewalls on the Internet, but we don’t make a huge deal of it or regard those resources inside or outside as being all that distinct from each other.

I think that in general, as the principles of cloud grab hold, the whole concept of cloud computing as a separate and distinct entity is going to go away, and it will just become computing as we know it.

Pau for now…

3 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Barton George

Low voltage DIMMs can mean huge savings in Hyperscale environments

January 16, 2011

Dell’s Data Center Solutions (DCS) group focuses on customers operating huge scaled out environments.  Given the number of systems deployed in these environments we are always looking for ways to take energy out of our systems.  A half a watt here, a half a watt there means big energy savings when multiplied across a hyper scale environment and translates into lower costs to our environment and to our customers’ operating budgets.

Recently we have adopted Samsung’s low voltage DIMMs (“Green DDR3″) in our efforts to drive efficiencies.   Take a listen to DCS’s Executive Director of engineering and architecture, Reuben Martinez, in the video below as he walks you through how a seemingly small decrease in DIMM voltage can translate to millions of dollars of savings in hyper scale environments.

Some of the ground Reuben covers:

  • How much energy US data centers consume and how this has grown.
  • What is happening to the cost of energy (hint: its going up:).
  • How our PowerEdge C6105 is designed for power efficiency including utilizing Samsung’s low-voltage memory. (BTW, Samsumg’s Green DDR3′s are also available in our C1100, C2100 and C6100)
  • The amount of power consumed by memory compared to the CPU (you may be surprised)
  • [2:35] The TCO calculation that shows the savings that low voltage DIMMs can provide in a typical data center environment.

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

2 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Barton George

Mark Shuttleworth on UEC and OpenStack

January 11, 2011

Mark Shuttleworth, the ever gracious founder of Ubuntu, stopped by Dell this morning to talk to various folks about various subjects.   I was able to grab some time with him between meetings and get his thoughts on a few topics.

I was particularly interested in getting his thoughts on Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) which will be available this week from Dell as the Dell | Canonical UEC Solution (along with the UEC software, the solution is based on our PowerEdge C2100 and C6100 and comes with a reference architecture and deployment guide).   The other topic I wanted to get his insight into was OpenStack.

Here’s what Mark had to say:

What Mark talked about

  • How Mark has settled into his role as non-CEO (he is still chairman).
  • What he is focusing on these days: the cloud and product design e.g. Unity.
  • [1:45] The thinking behind UEC and the combined Dell Canonical offering.
  • [3:45] OpenStack and Canonical’s participation
  • Working with both OpenStack and Eucalyptus and how both of these are central to the process of standardization that we are starting to see at the infrastructure layer of cloud computing.

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

15 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Barton George

Construction complete on Microsoft’s “Cloud Farm”

January 10, 2011

In Data Center Knowledge last week there was a short article, accompanied by a set of photos, that gave view into Microsoft’s very cool new “Cloud Farm” data center.  The design of the data center, which is located in Quincy Washington, was driven by Microsoft’s use of some ultra-cool modular data centers :) .  It was the modular nature of these units that helped Microsoft finish their initial deployment at their new facility in only eight months.

One of the modular data centers at Microsoft's Cloud Farm. Dang, those are good looking units. (Photo source: Data Center Knowledge)

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Barton George

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.