MDC in our parking lot, serving up OpenStack & Hadoop

September 11, 2012

Why use valuable internal real estate when you can just set up a Modular Data Center (MDC) in your parking lot?  The point wasn’t lost on the Dell Solution Center team who, with help from our partners Intel, is doing just that here in Round Rock.

The new MDC, which should be online in a few weeks, will host Dell’s OpenStack-Powered Cloud and Apache Hadoop solutions for customers to test drive and build POCs in Dell Solution Centers around the world.

Here’s the MDC being lowered into place yesterday.

Here are some pics I snapped this morning when I went down to get my coffee. (double click on them to see them full sized)

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

2 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Barton George

Hadoop World: What Dell is up to with Big Data, Open Source and Developers

December 18, 2011

Besides interviewing a bunch of people at Hadoop World, I also got a chance to sit on the other side of the camera.  On the first day of the conference I got a slot on SiliconANGLE’s the Cube and was interviewed by Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon and John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE.

-> Check out the video here.

Some of the ground we cover

  • How Dell got into the cloud/scale-out arena and how that lead us to Big Data
  • (2:08) The details behind the Dell|Cloudera solution for Apache Hadoop and our “secret sauce,” project crowbar.
  • (4:00) Dell’s involvement in and affinity for open source software
  • (5:31) Dell’s interest in and strategy around courting developers
  • (7:35) Dell’s strategy of Make, Partner or Buy in the cloud space
  • (11:10) How real is OpenStack and how is it evolving.

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Barton George

Open source Crowbar code now available for Hadoop

November 29, 2011

Earlier this month we announced that Dell would be open sourcing the Crowbar “barclamps” for Hadoop.  Well today is the day and the code is now available at our github repo.

Whats a Crowbar barclamp?

If you haven’t heard of project Crowbar it’s a software framework developed at Dell that started out as an installation tool for OpenStack.  As the project grew beyond installation to include monitoring capabilities, network discovery, performance data gathering etc., the developers behind it, Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus, decided to rewrite it to allow modules to plug into the basic Crowbar functionality.  These modules or “barclamps” allow the framework to be used by a variety of projects.  Besides the OpenStack and Hadoop barclamps written by Dell, VMware created a Cloud Foundry barclamp and DreamHost created a Ceph barclamp.

To help you get your bearings

As I mentioned in the opening  paragraph, the code for the Hadoop barclamp is now available.  To help you get started, below are a couple of videos that Rob put together.  The first walks you through how to install Crowbar and the second one explains how to use Crowbar to deploy Hadoop.

Extra-credit reading

Pau for  now…

6 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Barton George

Rob on Hyperscale Cloud Architecture

February 21, 2011

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.

Some of the topics Rob touches on:

  • “Nested centralized” vs “Flat Edges”
  • Fully redundant vs. cloud non-redundant
  • Fault zones across applications
  • Cloud-ready hardware

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Barton George

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 61 other followers

%d bloggers like this: