Yesterday I attended the Hadoop Summit down in Santa Clara. The one-day event featured a morning of general sessions followed by three tracks of break outs in the afternoon. The event also featured displays by several dozen vendors.
The big topic of the day was Hortonworks, a Yahoo! spin-out that had been announced the day before. The company, which will officially come into being next month will be made up of 25 core Hadoop engineers from Yahoo! Leading this new venture as its CEO is Yahoo! veteran and until this week VP of Hadoop engineering, Eric Baldeschwieler.
In the afternoon I was able to get some time with Eric and learn more about his new gig.
Some of the ground Eric covers
What is Hortonworks and what are its goals?
(0:46) Who is the technical team that will be making up the new venture
(1:48) Their president Rob Bearden, his open source experience and the business expertise he brings
(2:24) Their customers
(2:44) Which Hadoop engineers will remain at Yahoo!
(3:37) The symbiotic relationship Hortonworks and Yahoo! will have and how they will help one another
Extra-credit reading
Press release: Yahoo! and Benchmark Capital to Form Hortonworks to Increase Investment in Hadoop Technology and Accelerate Innovation and Adoption
To close out my series of interviews from last week’s Structure conference in San Francisco, below is the chat I had with Data Center Knowledge‘s founder and editor, Rich Miller. Last week’s event was the 4th Structure conference that Rich attended and I got his thoughts on some of the hot topics.
Some of the ground Rich covers
How the discussion of cloud has evolved over the last four years
(1:21) Rich’s thoughts on OpenFlow and the networking space
(2:25) Reflections on the next-gen server/chip discussion and the companies on the panel: SeaMicro, Tilera, Calxeda and AMD
(4:25) Facebook’s OpenCompute project and the new openess in data center design
Last week on Day two of Structure the morning sessions ended with an interesting discussion moderated by James Urquhart. The session was entitled “DevOps – Reinventing the Developers Role in the Cloud Age” and featured Luke Kanies – CEO, Puppet Labs and Jesse Robbins – Co-Founder and CEO, Opscode.
After lunch I ran into Jesse and got him to sit down with me and provide some more insight into DevOps as well as explain what Opscode was doing with project Crowbar.
Some of the ground Jesse covers
(0:21) What is DevOps
(1:00) The shift that happens between developers and operations. Writing code and getting it into production faster and how it shifts responsibilities between the two groups.
(2:52) Who are the prime targets for DevOps and how has this changed over time.
How DevOps began in web shops who needed to do things differently than legacy-bound enterprises.
How enterprises faced with greenfield opportunities are now embracing devops
(5:36) The crowbar installer which employs Opscode’s Chef and allows the rapid provisioning of an OpenStack cloud.
Last Thursday at Structure I ran into a couple of former Sun compadres who have started their own company in the cloud space: Cumulogic. Cumulogic is PaaS for developing Java applications and boasts the father of Java James Gosling and former Sun CIO Bill Vass as the leaders of its technical advisory board.
I got some time with Cumulogic’s CEO Rajesh Ramchandani and learned a bit about their new venture.
Some of the ground Rajesh covers:
Targeting enterprise Java PaaS for federated clouds
Announced the company in January and are conducting user betas now
Seeing early adopters in financial services and healthcare
Currently available as a public cloud via Amazon
Will have a release soon that will allow users to set up a private cloud within an enterprise on environments like vmware, cloud.com or eucalyptus.
If you’re looking for someone who is totaly connected in the field of data centers, look no further that Green Data center blogger Dave Ohara. I met Dave, who is a veteran of HP, Apple and Microsoft, last year at Gartner’s data center summit and learned a lot from him at a our first meeting. I was therefore very glad to run into him yesterday at the Structure conference.
I got some time with him today and asked Dave a few burning data center questions that have been on my mind.
Some of the ground Dave covers
Why all of a sudden are companies first foray’s into data centers becoming hot news?
The rise of the marketing and positioning of data centers
What are some of the pitfalls of moving from the public cloud or co-los to your own data center (hint: huge learning curve)
Your data center design should reflect your business model
Today was second day of the two-day Structure conference here in San Francisco. Cloud was the topic du jours with heavy referencing of big data and concepts and projects such as OpenFlow, Open Compute and OpenStack. The format consisted mainly of moderated panels seated in comfy chairs with break out sessions scheduled a couple of times during the day.
While some of the panels and speakers were quite enlightening, I find the true benefit of a show like Structure comes from the networking and hallway conversations that occur. One such conversation was one I had with Jonathan Bryce of Rackspace about the incubation program they have just launched for OpenStack.
Some of the ground Jonathan covers:
Dealing with the question of how to expand OpenStack and include new projects
The initial three core projects: Compute, Object Storage and Image Service
The first two projects that have been approved for incubation: a dashboard and “keystone”
Cybera, a Canadian not-for-profit recently selected OpenStack along with Dell systems to build out their Infrastructure as a Service cloud. The organization, which is based in Alberta, “collaborates with public and private sector partners to accelerate research and product development that meets the needs of today’s society.”
Most recently Cybera used OpenStack to build out a cloud for CANARIE’s (Canada’s Advanced Research and Innovation Network) DAIR project.
To start with, you’ll need hardware. If you have the time and inclination, the best thing to do might be to ask Rackspace Cloud Builders for some help spec’ing out the hardware for OpenStack. This is the route that Cybera went and we got some badly needed advice. Since you might not be able to go that route, I’ll tell you what we know.
At the end of the day we went with Dell, based on the Cloud Builders’ advice and our own due diligence. If you aren’t aware of it yet, Dell is supporting OpenStack in a big way. They have a number of pages dedicated to it here. There’s also a whitepaper that discusses hardware and network for OpenStack, if you feel like filling out the form.
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
Great to see people picking up OpenStack and running with it!
Last week Dell was out in force at the Cloud Computing Expo in New York as the event’s diamond sponsor. Besides the Keynote that President of Dell services Steve Schuckenbrock delivered, Dell also gave, or participated in 11 other talks.
I also gave one the talks and mine focused on the revolutionary approach to the cloud and talked about how this approach was setting a new bar for IT efficiency.
Here’s the deck:
(If the embedded deck doesn’t appear above, you can go to it directly on slideshare).
Talking with Press and Analysts
At the event I also met with press and analysts. One of the things I find helpful in explaining Dell’s strategy and approach to the cloud is to sketch it out for someone real time. I guess analysts Chris Gaun and Tony Iams of Ideas International found it helpful since they both tweeted a picture of it .
Besides analysts I also met with several individuals from the press. Mark Bilger, CTO of Dell services and I met with Michael Vizard of IT Business Edge and it resulted in the following article Cloud Computing Starts to Get a Little Foggy.
Additionally, to support the event and Dell’s cloud efforts going forward, Dell launched the Dell in the Clouds site. It’s pretty cool, you may just want to check it out.
Extra-credit reading (all my posts from Cloud Expo):
Last week at Cloud Expo in New York, Dell commissioned an independent third party, Marketing Solutions Corporation, to conduct a survey of IT professionals who were attending the show. The survey, which excluded IT members of technology providers, posed a series of cloud related questions and asked the IT professionals to answer both from their point of view and from the point of view of their non-technical senior management.
The results are in
Not surprisingly, the 223 IT respondents were split with 47% seeing cloud as an extension of long-term trends toward remote networks and virtualization while 37% believed it was a radically new way to think about their own IT function. When answering how they thought senior managers would view the cloud, 37% felt management saw cloud computing as having “immense potential.”
Interestingly, while 66% of the respondents said their IT department would both advocate and benefit from cloud-based solutions, most didn’t expect similar support or optimism from other departments. The next closest function was customer service which only 26% of the respondents felt would see cloud with equal optimism and marketing and sales with 25%.
To learn more about the survey and the conclusions drawn, see the release that went out Friday.
Earlier this week at CloudExpo, I talked to both Peder Ulander of Cloud.com and Rich Wolski of Eucalyptus about their involvement with RightScale‘s myCloud solution. Yesterday I thought I would go straight to the source so I got a hold of RightScale’s VP of business development, Josh Fraser.
Besides the myCloud announcement, Josh also told me about their work with Zynga. Zynga, as detailed in a recent InformationWeek article, has a hybrid cloud model. Zynga uses the Amazon public cloud to test new games and then if the game is a hit and when its demand has leveled off, they pull it back into their Z-cloud private cloud. RightScale manages across the two clouds.
Some of the ground Josh covers
What is RightScale
[0:26] Their myCloud announcement, widening their focus beyond public clouds to include private and hybrid. Who they’re partnering with, what myCloud is composed of and their free version.
[2:38] Working with Zynga, managing across both Zynga’s private Z-cloud and the public cloud they use at Amazon.
[4:09] Working with Amdocs who is running enterprise grade workloads in a private cloud managed by RightScale.
Yesterday at Cloud Expo I bumped in to Dr. Rich Wolski, CTO and co-founder of Cloud player, Eucalyptus. It had been a while since we had last talked so I grabbed some time with him and got him to give me the skinny:
Some of the ground Rich covers:
Eucalyptus’s major release which is coming out in the next 4 weeks
[0:40] The RightScale myCloud integration that they announced yesterday (linking Eucalyptus private clouds with various public clouds)
[2:01] Eucalyptus’s relationship with Canonical and how their interests are diverging
[3:15] Where specifically Eucalyptus is targeted
[4:25] What are some of their goals and product features they’d like to add over the next year
Today when I was walking the floor at the Cloud Expo here in New York, I ran into fellow Austinite Dustin Kirkland. Dustin is the manager for systems integration team for Ubuntu. I got Dustin to give me the low down on the most recent UDS (Ubuntu Developer Summit) that concluded a few weeks ago in Budapest:
Some of the ground that Dustin covers
The big areas of focus on the server side coming out of Budapest
Getting behind OpenStack as the Ubuntu IaaS platform
[1:09] The pioneering work they’ve done with Eucalyptus and how its use case differs from that of OpenStack
[2:05] The Ensemble project, a service orchestration framework for the cloud which is the brainchild of Mark Shuttleworth.
[3:59] Ubuntu Orchestra for cloud installation, provisioning and configuration management (using Puppet)
Last night at Cloud Expo, I got some time with Cloud.com‘s CMO Peder Ulander to learn how they are working with two key partners, OpenStack and RightScale. Peder told me how OpenStack is a key relationship for Cloud.com and gave me a quick overview of today’s announcement that Cloud.com is powering RightScale’s myCloud Private Cloud offering:
Some of the ground Peder covers:
Open Stack: The development work Cloud.com is doing on OpenStack; their work on a Swift implementation; and how Cloud.com and OpenStack might play together going foward
[1:25] RightScale: The myCloud announcement and the advantages it brings to enterprises. How the two companies are doing joint development and joint marketing.
Tonight at the opening reception for Cloud Expo, I ran into Peder Ulander, CMO of Cloud.com. We found a quiet spot off the show floor and I got him to tell all about Cloud.com, where they’ve been and where they’re going.
Some of the ground Peder covers
What is cloud.com, where does it play in the cloud ecosystem and what does it help customers do?
[01:22] Who are some of Cloud.com’s customers (hint: Nokia, Zynga, Korean Telecom…) and in what industries are they in?
[03:25] Where did the idea for cloud.com come from and what experience did the founders leverage in creating it?
Earlier today at Cloud Computing Expo here in New York, Boomi CTO Rick Nucci conducted a session entitled “Cloud Integration: Best practices for IT Executives.” Rick did a great job sketching out the issues to consider and what to take into account with regards to integration. The most compelling part of the talk, however came from Pradip Sitaram, CIO of Enterprise Business Partners and Boomi customer. Enterprise is a not-for-profit that builds affordable housing across the U.S.
After Pradip got off stage I sat down with him and got him to give a condensed version of his talk:
Some of the ground Pradip covers:
Enterprise homes house over 1 million people and every 55 minutes somebody moves into an enterprise home.
Dealing with the financial and occupancy reports that come from over 1600 properties, on a daily, monthly and yearly basis. How Boomi provided a solution to dealing with and managing these reports that was a fraction of the quote from the other vendor, and could be implemented in weeks instead of months.
Their longer term issue of dealing with over 70 databases that are out dated and need to be modernized. The answer is to go to the cloud and Boomi will act as their strategic integration platform making sure that all the pieces old and new work together.
Today, day one of the Cloud Computing Expo kicked off here at the Javits center in New York city. The event began with a keynote delivered by Steve Schuckenbrock, president of Dell Services. Dell is the Diamond sponsor at the event and Steve talked about finding the real business value in cloud computing and the business of “Yes, now“.
Another of today’s speaker was the founder and CTO of Boomi, Rick Nucci. Boomi provides a SaaS-based cloud integration offering and was acquired by Dell about six months ago. After Rick finished his session I grabbed some time with him to learn more Boomi.
Some of the ground Rick covers:
What Boomi is and how it got started in the integration space back in 2000.
[01:05] How Boomi’s integration offering evolved from a traditional middleware approach to cloud-based.
[02:51] How being acquired by Dell has changed how Boomi run’s its business and serves its customers.
Posted by Barton George 
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