Barton's Blog

Last summer at OSCON Dell announced the availability of our OpenStack solution in the US and Canada.  Today at World Hosting Days in Rust Germany we are now announcing that our OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution is available in Europe and Asia.

If you’re not familiar with it, OpenStack is an open source cloud project built on a foundation of code initially donated by NASA and Rackspace.  The project kicked off a little over a year and a half ago here in Austin and it has gained amazing traction since then.

Dell’s offering

Dell’s OpenStack cloud offering is an open source, on premise cloud solution based on the OpenStack platform running on Ubuntu.  Its composed of:

• The OpenStack cloud operating system
• PowerEdgeC servers: C6100, C6105, C2100 and, coming soon, Dell’s new C6220 and R720
• The Crowbar deployment and management software framework – developed and coded by Dell 🙂
• Dell’s OpenStack reference architecture
• Dell Services

Crowbar software framework

To give a little more  background on the Crowbar software framework, its an open source project developed initially at Dell and you can grab it off github.  The framework, which is under the Apache 2.0 license,  manages 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 hours, as opposed to days.

Once the initial deployment is complete, you can use Crowbar to maintain, expand, and architect the complete solution, including BIOS configuration, network discovery, status monitoring, performance data gathering, and alerting.   Beyond Dell, companies like VMware, Dreamhost and Zenoss have built “barclamps”  that allow them to utilize Crowbar’s modular design.  Additionally, customers who buy the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution get training, deployment, and support on Crowbar.

So as of today, customers in the UK, Germany and China can purchase the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution.  As customer demand grows in other regions we will be adding more countries so stay tuned.  If the first 18 mos of the project are any indication of whats the pace is like to come, we are all going to be in for a lot more excitement.

For more info, email: OpenStack@Dell.com

Extra-credit reading

• Blog: Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution Now Available in Europe and Asia
• Blog: World Hosting Day: Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution with Ubuntu 
• Blog: Dell announces availability of OpenStack solution; Open sources “Crowbar” software framework
• Blog: Introducing OpenStack — an open source cloud platform

Pau for now…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 21st, 2012 at 5:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.