Talking to Nodeable CEO Dave Rosenberg (think Twitter for machines)

October 26, 2011

Yesterday I was out in the bay area to help moderate a Hackeratti shindig on Sand Hill road.  One of my fellow moderators was Dave Rosenberg former CEO and founder of MuleSoft.   Dave who is also an active contributor to cnet has recently started a new endeavor, Nodeable.  This new venture, which Stephen O’Grady of Redmonk called “twitter for machines” also features former Canonical VP of corporate services, Neil Levine.

Before we began our moderating duties, I sat down with Dave to learn a little more about his cool new venture.

Some of the ground Dave covers:

  • Just what is Nodeable
  • (0:40) The rise of the cloud developer and the profile of the developer that Nodeable is targeted at.
  • (2:10) Kicking off  their private beta and heading to a public beta in Q4
  • (2:48) What part of Nodeable is open source and which part is the secret sauce
  • (3:26) Nodeable’s architecture and the languages its written in
  • (4:00) Where does Dave hope to see Nodeable a year from now

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Crowbar: Where its been and where its going

October 24, 2011

Rob Hirschfeld, aka “Commander Crowbar,” recently posted a blog entry looking back at how Crowbar came to be, how its grown and where he hopes it will go from here.

What’s a Crowbar?

If you’re not familiar with Crowbar, its an open source software framework that began life as an installation tool to speed installation of OpenStack on Dell hardware.  The project incorporates the Opscode Chef Server tool and was originally created here at Dell by Rob and Greg Althaus.  Just four short months ago at OSCON 2011 the project took a big step forward when, along with the announcement of our OpenStack solution, we announced that we were opensourcing it.

DevOps-ilicous

As Rob points out in his blog, as we were delivering Crowbar as an installer a collective light bulb went off and we realized the role that Chef and tools like it play in a larger movement taking place in many Web shops today: the movement of DevOps.

The DevOps approach to deployment builds up systems in a layered model rather than using packaged images…Crowbar’s use of a DevOps layered deployment model provides flexibility for BOTH modularized and integrated cloud deployments.

On beyond installation and OpenStack

As the team began working more with Crowbar, it occurred to them that its use could be expanded in two ways: it could be used to do more than installation and it could be expanded to work with projects beyond OpenStack.

As for functionality, Crowbar now not only installs and configures but once the initial deployment is complete, Crowbar can be used to maintain, expand, and architect the instance, including BIOS configuration, network discovery, status monitoring, performance data gathering, and alerting.

The first project beyond OpenStack that we used Crowbar on was Hadoop.  In order to expand Crowbar’s usage we created the concept of  “barclamps” which are in essence modules that sit on top of the basic Crowbar functionality.  After we created the Hadoop barclamp, others picked up the charge and VMware created a Cloud Foundry barclamp and DreamHost created a Ceph barclamp.

It takes a community

Crowbar development has recently been moved out into the open.  As Rob explains,

This change was reflected in our work on OpenStack Diablo (+ Keystone and Dashboard) with contributions by Opscode and Rackspace Cloud Builders.  Rather than work internally and push updates at milestones, we are now coding directly from the Crowbar repositories on Github.

So what are you waiting for?  Join our mailing list, download the code or ISO, create a barclamp, make your voice heard.  Who’s next?

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Cote and I discuss Dell World and our new Web|Tech Vertical

October 19, 2011

Last week we held Dell’s first Dell World event here in Austin, Texas.  The two-day event was targeted at CxOs and IT professionals and featured an expo, panels and speakers such as CEOs Mark Benioff, Paul Otellini, Steve Ballmer and Paul Maritz as well as former CIO of the United States, Vivek Kundra.  And of course, being Austin, it also featured a lot of great music and barbeque.

At the end of the first day Michael Cote grabbed sometime with me and we talked about the event.

Some of the ground I cover:

  • Dell World overview and our Modular Data Center
  • (3:35) Talking to press/analysts about our new Web|Tech vertical and our focus on developers
  • (6:00) The event’s attempt to up-level the conversation rather than diving into speeds, feeds and geeky demos.

The Dell Modular Data Center on the expo floor (photo: Yasushi Osonoi:@osonoi)

(double click to see full sized)

Extra Credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Big Data is the new Cloud

October 12, 2011

Big Data represents the next not-completely-understood got-to-have strategy.  This first dawned on me about a year ago and has continued to become clearer as the phenomenon has gained momentum.  Contributing to Big Data-mania is Hadoop, today’s weapon of choice in the taming and harnessing of  mountains of unstructured data, a project that has its own immense gravitational pull of celebrity.

So what

But what is the value of slogging through these mountains of data?  In a recent Forrester blog, Brian Hopkins lays it out very simply:

We estimate that firms effectively utilize less than 5% of available data. Why so little? The rest is simply too expensive to deal with. Big data is new because it lets firms affordably dip into that other 95%. If two companies use data with the same effectiveness but one can handle 15% of available data and one is stuck at 5%, who do you think will win?

The only problem is that while unstructured data (email, clickstream data, photos, web logs, etc.) makes up the vast majority of today’s data, the majority of the incumbent data solutions aren’t designed to handle it.    So what do you do?

Deal with it

Hadoop, which I mentioned above, is your first line of offense when attacking big data.  Hadoop is an open source highly scalable compute and storage platform.  It can be used to collect, tidy up and store boatloads of structure and unstructured data.  In the case of enterprises it can be combined with a data warehouse and then linked to analytics (in the case web companies they forgo the warehouse).

And speaking of web companies Hopkins explains

Google, Yahoo, and Facebook used big data to deal with web scale search, content relevance, and social connections, and we see what happened to those markets. If you are not thinking about how to leverage big data to get the value from the other 95%, your competition is.

So will Big Data truly displace Cloud as the current must-have buzz-tastic phenomenon in IT?  I’m thinking in many circles it will.  While less of a tectonic shift, Big Data’s more “modest” goals and concrete application make it easier to draw a direct line between effort and business return.  This in turn will drive greater interest, tire kicking and then implementation.  But I wouldn’t kick the tires for too long for as the web players have learned, Big Data is a mountain of straw just waiting to be spun into gold.

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

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