OSCON: ex-NASA cloud lead on his OpenStack startup, Piston

July 31, 2011

Last week  at OSCON in Portland, I dragged Josh McKenty away from the OpenStack one-year anniversary (that’s what Josh is referring to at the very end of the interview) to do a quick video.  Josh, who headed up NASA’s Nebula tech team and has been very involved with OpenStack from the very beginning has recently announced Piston, a startup that will productize OpenStack for enterprises.

Here is what the always entertaining Josh had to say:

Some of the ground Josh covers:

  • What, in a nutshell, will Piston be offering?
  • Josh’s work at NASA and how got involved in OpenStack
  • Timing around Piston’s general release and GA
  • The roles he plays on the OpenStack boards
  • What their offering will have right out of the shoot and their focus on big data going forward

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

OSCON: How foursquare uses MongoDB to manage its data

July 27, 2011

I saw a great talk today here at OSCON Data up in Portland, Oregon.  The talk was Practical Data Storage: MongoDB @ foursquare and was given by foursquare‘s head of server engineering, Harry Heymann.  The talk was particularly impressive since, due to AV issues, Harry had to wing it and go slideless.  (He did post his slides to twitter so folks with access could follow along).

After the talk I grabbed a few minutes with Harry and did the following interview:

Some of the ground Harry covers

  • What is foursquare and how it feeds your data back to you
  • “Software is eating the world”
  • How foursquare  got to MongoDB from MySQL
  • Handling 3400% growth
  • How they use Hadoop for offline data
  • Running on Amazon EC2 and at what point does it make sense to move to their own servers

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Dell announces availability of OpenStack solution; Open sources “Crowbar” software framework

July 26, 2011

Today at OSCON we are announcing the availability of the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution along with the open sourcing of the code behind our Crowbar software framework.

The Solution

Dell has been a part of the OpenStack community since day one a little over a year ago and today’s news represents the first available cloud solution based on the OpenStack platform.  This Infrastructure-as-a-service solution includes a reference architecture based on Dell PowerEdge C servers, OpenStack open source software, the Dell-developed Crowbar software and services from Dell and Rackspace Cloud Builders.

Crowbar, keeping things short and sweet

Bringing up a cloud can be no mean feat, as a result a couple of our guys began working on a software framework that could be used to quickly (typically before coffee break!) bring up a multi-node OpenStack cloud on bare metal.   That framework became Crowbar.  What Crowbar does is manage the OpenStack deployment from the initial server boot to the configuration of the primary OpenStack components, allowing users to complete bare metal deployment of multi-node OpenStack clouds in a matter of hours (or even minutes) instead of days.

Once the initial deployment is complete, Crowbar can be used to maintain, expand, and architect the complete solution, including BIOS configuration, network discovery, status monitoring, performance data gathering, and alerting.

Code to the Community

As mentioned above, today Dell has released Crowbar to the community as open source code (you can get access to it the project’s GitHub site).  The idea is allow  users to build functionality to address their specific system needs.  Additionally we are working with the community to submit Crowbar as a core project in the OpenStack initiative.

Included in the Crowbar code contribution is the barclamp list, UI and remote API’s, automated testing scripts, build scripts, switch discovery, open source Chef server.  We are currently working with our legal team to determine how to release the BIOS and RAID which leverage third party components.  In the meantime since it is free (as in beer) software, although Dell cannot distribute it, users can directly go the vendors and download the components for free to get that functionality.

More Crowbar detail

For those who want some more detail, here are some bullets I’ve grabbed from Rob “Mr. Crowbar” Hirschfeld’s blog:

Important notes:

  • Crowbar uses Chef as it’s database and relies on cookbooks for node deployments
  • Crowbar has a modular architecture so individual components can be removed, extended, and added. These components are known individually as “barclamps.”
  • Each barclamp has it’s own Chef configuration, UI subcomponent, deployment configuration, and documentation.

On the roadmap:

  • Hadoop support
  • Additional operating system support
  • Barclamp version repository
  • Network configuration
  • We’d like suggestions!  Please comment on Rob’s blog!

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Intel version of Dell’s third gen Microserver now available

July 19, 2011

Over the past three years Dell’s Data Center Solutions group has been designing custom microservers for a select group of web hosters.  The first generation allowed one of France’s largest hosters, Online.net to enter a new market and gain double digit market share.  The second generation brought additional capabilities to the original design along with greater performance.

A few months ago we announced that we were taking our microserver designs beyond our custom clients and making these systems available to a wider audience.  Last month the AMD-based PowerEdge C5125 microserver became available and yesterday the Intel-based PowerEdge C5220 microserver made its debut.   Both are ultra-dense 3U systems that pack up to twelve individual servers into one enclosure.

To get a great overview of  both the 12 sled and 8 sled versions of the new C5220 system, let product manager Deania Davidson take you on a quick tour:

Target use-cases and environments

  • Hosting applications such as dedicated, virtualized, shared, static content, and cloud hosting
  • Web 2.0 applications such as front-end web servers
  • Power, space, weight and performance constrained data center environments such as co-los and large public organizations such as universities, and government agencies

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now..,

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Posted by Barton George

Plug and Play Tech Center – Start up Accelerator and a lot more

July 17, 2011

The day after I attended the Hadoop Summit I paid a visit to Candace Denton and the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale.   Plug and Play, which occupies the space that once housed Phillips Semiconductor, describes itself as a community of over 300 technology startup companies in the areas of Web 2.0, mobile, digital media, software systems (SaaS), semiconductor and telecom verticals.

Candace, who heads up Business Development at Plug and Play, gave myself and and a couple of Dell compadres a tour of their Sunnyvale facilities.  After the tour we sat down in the lobby and she gave a brief synopsis of Plug and Play, where they’ve come from and what they do.

Some of the ground Candace covers

  • Plug and Play’s five pillars of resources
    • (0:22) Funding (they have their own funding arm)
    • (1:08) Facilities (over 300,000 sq ft in the Valley)
    • (1:23) Corporate relationships
    • (1:36) Mentorship and advisory service
    • (1:41) Networking events (hold up to 120 events a year)
  • (2:28) A few of the success stories that have exited Plug and Play
  • (3:43) How their founder Saeed Amidi got into this business: from leasing office space to a fledgling Google, to a bottled water company to setting up their current facilities

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Dell opens Customer Solutions Center in Austin

July 14, 2011

Back in April, Dell announced that it was making a billion dollar investment to further drive its evolution from a systems to a services company.  Specifically we talked about delivering a raft of new solutions, launching 10 cloud data centers around the world and building out a global network of solutions centers.

The solution centers are customer facing facilities that will act as a “living lab” providing an environment and the support for customers to architect, build and test proof of concepts involving Dell products, services and solutions.  The centers will also support solution integration, technical briefings and validation and ISV certification to meet regional requirements.  Last month the first of these centers were opened in Limerick, Ireland and Shanghai.

This morning the first US solutions center opened at Dell HQ here in Austin.  Here is a short montage of the opening ceremonies.

Contents

  • The crowd
  • (0:16) Opening Remarks: Jan Uhrich VP of Dell Services
  • (1:12) Steve Schuckenbrock, President, Dell Services — How the center fits in Dell’s strategy and transformation
  • (3:51) Paul Bell, President Dell Public and Large Enterprise — A couple of customer examples of large organizations who had early access to the facility and what they accomplished.
  • (6:26) William Collins, Head of the Austin Solution Center — The next two centers to open in the U.S.
  • (7:3o) Ribbon cutting

After the ribbon cutting I took the tour to see some of the solutions on display.  I’ll be posting those in the days to come.  Stay tuned!

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Hadoop Summit: Looking at the evolving ecosystem with Ken Krugler

July 13, 2011

Here is the final entry in my interview series from the Hadoop Summit.

The night before the summit, I was impressed when I heard Ken Krugler speak at the BigDataCamp unconference.  Turns out Ken has been a part of the Hadoop scene even before there was a Hadoop, his 2005 start-up Krugle utilized Nutch which split and evolved into Hadoop.  He now runs a Hadoop consulting practice, Bixo labs, and offers training.

I ran into Ken the next day at the summit and sat down with him to get his thoughts on Hadoop and the ecosystem around it.

Some of the ground Ken covers

  • How he first began using Hadoop many moons ago
  • (0:53)  How Hadoop has crossed the chasm over the last half decade
  • (1:53)  The classes he teaches, one very technical and the other an intro class
  • (2:23)  What the heck is Hadoop anyway?
  • (3:30)  What trends Ken has seen recently in the Hadoop world (the rise of  the fat node)

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Hadoop Summit: Chatting with Cloudera’s VP of Product

July 11, 2011

The next in my series of videos from the Hadoop Summit features Cloudera‘s Vice President of product, Charles Zedlewski.  If you’re not familiar with Cloudera you can think of them as the Red Hat of Hadoop world.

I sat down with Charles to learn more about Cloudera, what they do and where they came from.

Some of the ground Charles covers:

  • Cloudera’s founding, what its original goals and vision were and where its founders came from.
  • (1:35) What Cloudera does for customers 1) packages Hadoop and 2) helps them run it in production environments.
  • (3:27)  What channels Cloudera leverages and where they play in the ecosystem
  • (4:11)  Charles’ thoughts on the Yahoo spin-out Hortonworks and how it might affect Cloudera.

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Hadoop Summit: Talking to the CEO of MapR

July 10, 2011

I’m now back from vacation and am continuing with my series of videos from the Hadoop Summit.  The one-day summit, which was very well attended, was held in Santa Clara the last week of June.  One of the two Platinum sponsors was MapR technologies.  MapR are particulaly interesting since they have taken a different approach to productizing Hadoop than the current leader Cloudera.

I got some time with their CEO and co-founder John Schroeder to learn more about MapR:

Some of the ground John covers

  • The announcements they made at the event
  • (0:16) How John got the idea to start MapR: what tech trends he was seeing and what customer problems was he learning about.
  • (1:43) How MapR’s approach to Hadoop differs from Cloudera (and Hortonworks)
  • (3:49) How the Hadoop community is growing, both with regards to Apache and the commercial entities that are developing, and the importance of this growth.

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

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