Last week at the OpenStack Design Summit I met up with Erica Brescia, CEO of BitRock who was accompanied by BitRock’s founder and CTO Daniel Lopez Ridruejo. Although BitRock’s recently announcedBitNami Cloud Hosting currently runs solely on Amazon’s EC2, Erica and Daniel were at the OpenStack event to see if OpenStack might make sense as a second platform.
I grabbed some time with Erica and we did a quick interview and demo:
Some of the ground Erica covers:
BitRock, facilitating the installation of software. Who are the big open source players that BitRock makes easy to deploy.
Bitnami.org providing end users with completely free native installers, virtual appliances or cloud templates
Who are the targets users for BitNami cloud hosting
The demo covers:
Creating a server on Amazon EC2 in minutes, with apps added
Earlier this week, I attended the first two days of the OpenStack Design Summit out in Santa Clara, CA. Before I took off I grabbed sometime with Jim Curry, GM of Rackspace Cloud Builders and the leader of Rackpace’s OpenStack efforts.
I got Jim’s thoughts on how the summit was going, how the project was going as well as some breaking news.
Some of the ground Jim covers:
Jim’s areas of responsibility
How this week’s Design summit is different from the first two? (how its grown and changed)
Some of the hot topics at this summit
Breaking news re. the next release, Diablo, milestones and a regular cadence
Note: I had a brain cramp and said Ubuntu follows the Mozilla schedule, I meant GNOME (go figure)
At the last OpenStack design summit, I sat down with Eucalyptus co-founder Graziano Obertelli and got his thoughts on the effort. This morning I bumped into a now clean-shaven Graziano and thought Id get his input on this week’s summit.
Some of the ground Graziano covers:
What Graziano’s goals are for this weeks OpenStack summit
Earlier today the OpenStack Design Summit kicked off here at the Hyatt in Santa Clara. This four day event is bringing together developers, users and business people to discuss OpenStack and design its future.
Among this morning’s attendees was James Staten Forrester Research’s cloud guru. I grabbed James at the first break and got his thoughts on the event’s kick-off and OpenStack in general.
Some of the ground James covers:
Why he chose to attend and what he’s looking for
What he thought of the opening presentations and how something like an OpenStack could alleviate some of the pain of outages like Amazon had last week.
What type of outcomes he would like to see from this weeks summit.
How important are programs like Rackspace’s cloud builder effort.
This morning at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto the company announced their Open Compute project Partners and kindred spirits were there to tell the story behind Open Compute and explain what they think it means to the industry. One group of kindred spirits were the individuals from Rackspace. I got some time with Jim Curry who heads up OpenStack at Rackspace after the event officially ended.
Here is what Jim had to say:
Some of the topics Jim covers:
Driving efficiencies in data center design requires looking at the issue holistically.
Learning from Facebook’s successes and failures.
Looking forward to collaboration in an area that hasn’t historically had a lot of collaboration.
Engagement with Facebook engineers on how to run OpenStack on their hardware.
Today at its headquarters in Palo Alto, Facebook and a collection of partners such as Dell, Intel and AMD — as well as kindred spirits like RackSpace’s founder (the company behind OpenStack) and the CIO of the Department of Energy — are on hand to reveal the details behind Facebook’s first custom-built data center and to announce the Open Compute project.
Efficiency: saving energy and cost
The big message behind Facebook’s new data center, located in Prineville Oregon, is one of efficiency and openness. The facility will use servers and technology that deliver a 38 percent gain ìn energy efficiency. To bring the knowledge that the company and its partners have gained in constructing this hyper-efficient hyper-scale data center Facebook is announcing the Open Compute project.
Much the way open source software shares the code behind the software, the Open Compute project has been created to provide the specifications behind the hardware. As a result, Facebook will be publishing the specs for the technology used in their data center’s servers, power supplies, racks, battery backup systems and building design. By releasing these specs, Facebook is looking to promote the sharing of data center and server technology best practices across the industry.
How does Dell fit in?
Dell, which has a long relationship with Facebook, has been collaborating on the Open Compute project. Dell’s Data Center Solutions group has designed and built a data center solution using components from the Open Compute project and the server portion of that solution will be on display today at Facebook’s event. Additionally Forrest Norrod, Dell’s GM of server platforms will be a member of the panel at the event talking about the two companies’ common goal of designing the next generation of hyper efficient data centers.
A bit of history
Dell first started working with Facebook back in 2008 when they had a “mere” 62 million active users. At that time the three primary areas of focus in with regards to the Facebook IT infrastructure were:
Decreasing power usage
Creating purpose-built servers to match Facebook’s tiered infrastructure needs
Having tier 1 dedicated engineering resources to meet custom product and service needs
Over the last three-plus years, as Facebook has grown to over 500 million active users, Dell has spefically helped out to address these challenges by:
Building custom solutions to meet Facebook’s evolving needs, from custom-designed servers for their web cache, to memcache systems to systems supporting their database tiers.
Delivering these unique servers quickly and cost effectively via Dell’s global supply chain. Our motto is “arrive and live in five”, so within five hours of the racks of servers arriving at the dock doors, they’re live and helping to support Facebook’s 500 million users.
Achieving the greatest performance with the highest possible efficiency. Within one year, as the result of Dell’s turnkey rack integration and deployment services, we were able to save Facebook 84,000 pounds of corrugated cardboard and 39,000 pounds of polystyrene during that same year.
Congratulations Facebook! And thank you for focusing on both open sharing and on energy efficiency from the very beginning!
OpenStack, the open source cloud platform based on code donated by NASA and Rackspace, has gained considerable traction since it was launched eight months ago. The community has rapidly grown and there have been several releases. Now its time to get potential customers trying it out and kicking the tires.
With the idea of removing friction to adoption and make the testing out of the platform as easy as possible, Dell, Equinix and Rackspace are announcing today the availability of a free OpenStack cloud demonstration and test environment.
The idea of the demo environment is to allow organizations to easily evaluate OpenStack and assess application performance on the platform in a low risk environment for free. The next step after a successful demo would be a proof of concept.
Movin workloads around the country
This demo environment is initially available in three U.S. data centers and in Q2 of this year this offering will also be available in Equinix data centers in Europe and Asia. The initial data centers are:
Equinix Silicon Valley
Equinix Asburn, VA
Rackspace Chicago
By having geographically dispersed facilities customers are able to test out the moving of applications and workloads between them.
The various parts
The OpenStack demo environment is made up of the following components
Platform Equinix, a global delivery platform of 92 network neutral data centers in 35 metro markets
Widening the circle
The name of the game here is making the trying out of OpenStack as easy as possible. There are a lot of community members and open source aficionados who are already testing out OpenStack. The idea with OpenStack cloud demonstration environment is to provide a set up where a greater number of organizations feel comfortable evaluating the platform for themselves.
One of the trickiest things to get right in an open source project is the governance model. Who makes up the various boards and gets what authority is something struggled over and something that virtually no one gets right straight out of the gate. Its particularly interesting if you are a commercial entity sponsoring a project and want to maintain a certain amount of influence over the endeavor but also want it to grow and flourish.
Two weeks ago Jonathan Bryce, Rackspace cloud co-founder and one of the leads of the OpenStack project policy board, announced the changes that were being made to OpenStack’s governance.
I ran into Jonathan on Monday during South by Southwest and sat down with him to get some more insight into what the changes were and why they were being made.
Some of the ground Jonathan covers:
From Mosso to Rackspace cloud to OpenStack
How they’ve been surprised by the great uptake by the community and how this has led them to evolve the governance structure.
What the various boards are and what their make up will be
Last week and this, Austin’s downtown has been taken over by the South by Southwest festival (SXSW). What started out nearly 25 years ago as a music festival/conference has grown to include parallel film and interactive events as well. During the event every bar and venue downtown is occupied with bands, films or tech companies showing their stuff.
Check out the mini montage below that includes a quick interview I did with Dell solutions engineer Greg Althaus right after he finished the demo.
Don’t take our word for it
Dell is currently field testing crowbar and plans to donate the code to the OpenStack community after testing. If you are interested in testing crowbar yourself, email us at OpenStack@Dell.com.
Some of the ground the video covers
Intro montage: Welcome to the Kung Fu Saloon, setting up and a snippet of the demo
[0:40] Talking to Greg
What actually is crowbar and how does it work with OpenStack compute and storage?
How fast can you spin up a cloud using it?
Where does OpsCode’s Chef fit in?
Our plan to donate this code to the community after field testing.
One small step for OpenStack, one giant step for mankind! Ok, that may be taking it a bit far but today there is some exciting news that Dell and Rackspace have announced.
If OpenStack is new to you it’s the open source cloud platform based off of the Nebula cloud code base donated by NASA (hence all the rocket allusions) and the storage code base from Rackspace. The project is now about eight months old and its community is over 50 organizations strong including NASA, Citrix, AMD, Intel, NTT, cloud.com, RightScale, Dell, Opscode and Puppet labs.
To help the community and organizations get up and going building out their own OpenStack based clouds we are announcing the following:
Proof of Concepts: Rackspace and Dell are working together to deliver an OpenStack solution to market later this year. As the first step along the way we are currently seeking customers for OpenStack proofs of concept (POC). If you are interested in learning more about the POCs and possibly participating or getting engaged, email: OpenStack@Dell.com.
Code: Dell has developed an OpenStack installer that can be used to quickly install OpenStack on bare metal Dell PowerEdge C servers. This tool is being field tested, and Dell will contribute the code to the OpenStack community once testing is complete. To help users out further, once the OS is installed, the servers can be updated with all the latest packages and be automatically configured by Opscode’s Chef to provide their services in the OpenStack infrastructure.
Technical whitepaper: A technical whitepaper, “Bootstrapping OpenSource Clouds” which lays out the design of a hyperscale OpenStack cloud on Dell PowerEdge C servers.
But wait, there’s more, “Cloud Builders”…
To help support OpenStack deployments, Rackspace announced today that its launching a new division, “Cloud Builders.” Cloud Builders “will provide training, certification, deployment services and ongoing support and management to enterprises and service providers via the team of OpenStack experts and its partner network.”
Specifically the offerings will include (taken from the Rackspace blog):
Training & Certification – Rackspace Cloud Builders will provide training classes and certification testing for designing, developing and administering OpenStack Clouds. Rackspace also plans to empower a network of training and certification experts.
Deployment Services – Rackspace Cloud Builders, in conjunction with other experts from the OpenStack community, will help customers design and deploy OpenStack Clouds.
Support & Management – Customers will have ongoing access to remote support and escalation assistance from the OpenStack specialists, including proactive monitoring and fixes.
OpenStack is picking up momentum, stay tuned for more and in the meantime, set the controls for the heart of the sun!
Earlier this month when the Bexar release for OpenStack went live, a meet up was held in Santa Clara. As a part of the event, a series of lightening talks were given by various OpenStack community members. One of the speakers was Dell’s very own Rob Hirschfeld, a senior cloud solutions architect, who has been actively involved with the OpenStack project from the get-go.
Here is the short presentation that Rob gave where he talks about some of the key characteristics of a hyperscale environment and how it differs from a traditional enterprise data center.
Yesterday, the announcement went out that the Dell | Canonical Enterprise Cloud, Standard Edition was out and ready for consumption. What this cloud-in-a-box allows folks to do is to set-up affordable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas)-style private clouds in their computer labs or data centers. The cool thing is that, because the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) software is compatible with Amazon Web Services EC2 and S3 services, it enables IT admins and developers to move workloads between public and private clouds.
Who cares?
Application developers and IT service providers and admins who are setting up cloud POC’s are perfect candidates for this pre-configured testing and development environment. With regards to industries, areas where there is a lot of software development work like Hosters, Telco & Communications, Media & Entertainment and Web 2.0 businesses are prime markets for the Dell UEC solution.
So what’s in it?
The solutions’ basic components are Dell PowerEdge C systems plus a Dell-specific download of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (made up of the Ubuntu operating system and the Eucalyptus platform for private cloud computing). To simplify getting the whole shebang up and running Dell and Canonical are providing the following:
Walrus Controller (W) – the cloud’s storage repository
Cluster Controller (CC) – the controller for a up to 1024 compute cores grouped together as a cluster
Storage Controller (SC) – the controller for cluster’s storage repository
Compute Node (CN) – cloud’s compute node
And on the support side…
If you’re looking for systems management and support services with your order, you are in luck. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has put together UEC Assist, a support service built specifically for Dell customers deploying SE Edition and which is delivered by Canonical’s Global Services and Support team.
Its all about efficiency
From a Dell DCS (the group at Dell behind this) point of view, this offering fits in well with our strategy of bringing total solutions to market that optimize efficiency at every layer, from code to servers to storage. The open source Dell UEC solution is tailor made to deliver a ready to go IaaS solution.
Last not but least in my series of videos from the OpenStackdesign summit, is an interview I did with David Lemphers of Price Waterhouse Coopers. David recently joined PWC as their director of cloud computing after spending six years at Microsoft, most recently as one of the principle engineers on the Windows Azure platform.
I talked with David to get his thoughts on OpenStack and here is what he had to say:
Some of the ground Dave covers:
Dave’s background
What he’s doing at PWC as the cloud director
Why decided to attend (and present at) the OpenStack summit and why he’s so bullish on the platform.
Today the OpenStackdesign summit wrapped up down in San Antonio. The summit featured close to 300 attendees representing 90 different companies. One of the key partners since the project kicked off back in July has been Citrix. On Wednesday I caught up with Gordon Mangione, Vice President of cloud at Citrix to get his thoughts on the project and this week’s summit. Here’s his enthusiastic response:
Continuing in my series of videos from the OpenStack design summit this week in San Antonio, here is an interview I did yesterday with Eucalyptus systems co-founder Graziano Obertelli.
Eucalyptus allows enterprises to set up open source infrastructure-as-a-service private clouds. Eucalyptus is also one of the key ingredients in the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud that is being certified to run on Dell’s PowerEdge C systems as part of our cloud ISV program.
Here is what Graziano had to say:
Some of the ground Graziano covers:
What goals do the Eucalyptus team have for the summit
They’ve recently hired a community manager – Mark Atwood
Yesterday, near the end of day two of the OpenStack design summit, I caught up with Rick Clark, chief architect of the OpenStack platform. I wanted to get Rick’s thought’s on how the four-month old open source cloud computing project and the summit were going.
Here’s what he had to say:
Some of the ground Rick covers:
The goal of the summit as well as the goal of the next two releases.
One of the featured speakers during the kick off of the OpenStack design summit yesterday was NASA CTO of IT, Chris Kemp. OpenStack is an open source cloud platform and the compute side of the project is based on code from NASA’s Nebula cloud.
I got some time with Chris and learned about NASA’s involvement in the project:
Some of the ground Chris covers:
Nebula and the cloud computing platform code base
NASA’s huge data needs and what they do with the data
Serendipity: NASA’s cloud engine + Rackspace’s file system engine
How NASA is working with the project: a two-way street
Last but not least in my series of interviews from last month’s Cloud Summit at OSCON I present to you my conversation with Simon Phipps. Simon, who until earlier this year was the chief Open Source officer at Sun Microsystems, recently joined the start-up ForgeRock as their chief strategy officer. Here is what Simon says:
Some of the topics Simon tackles:
ForgeRock offers access management and authentication software based on open source code that was developed at Sun.
Since the software is open source you can download it for free at ForgeRock.
ForgeRock makes its money by selling subscriptions that provide various grades of SLAs.
Even though they are 4 mos old, they already have 20 customers including the world’s largest gambling exchange.
At OSCON last week I ran into a compadre from a previous life, Fred Kohout. Fred is now the CMO at UC4, a pure play software automation company, and he, like I, was in Portland to attend OSCON and the Cloud Summit.
At the summit Fred did to me what I’ve done to so many others, he got me on the receiving end of a video camera to talk about where Dell plays in the cloud and how we see the cloud evolving.
You can check out Fred’s blog from the Summit where he posted my video as well as the interview he did with another former compadre, Peder Ulander, CMO at cloud.com.
Don’t touch that dial
If you’re interested in OSCON be sure to stay tuned. I’ve got four more interviews from the event that I will be posting soon.
Today Rackspace and NASAannounced OpenStack, an open source cloud platform that they are collaborating on and building a community around. Last week the inaugural OpenStack design summit was held here in Austin with 20 companies from around the world, including Dell, participating.
During one of the breaks I grabbed sometime with Rackspace’s cloud president, Lew Moorman to learn more about the effort and get his thoughts:
Some of the topics Lew tackles:
What is OpenStack (an opensource set of technologies for building clouds…)
Why Rackspace decided to opensource their code .
How Rackspace got hooked up with NASA and what each brings to the party.
Taking Nebula’s core foundation and adding some elements from Rackspace’s side in order to put together a release candidate that should be available to the community this Fall.
Posted by Barton George 
