I’m excited to report the global launch of Dell’s next major version of the Openstack-powered cloud solution and Reference Architecture featuring:
- The latest OpenStack version, Essex
- The latest 12th generation Power Edge Dell Servers, R720, and R720XD
- Canonical OpenStack distribution and Operating System: Ubuntu 12.04
- Dell Force 10 switching: S60
- Next version of our innovative OpenStack deployment and operations software: Crowbar
- Available in select countries in Europe and Asia: UK, Germany, and China
Latest Updates:
- Dell adds the latest 12th generation PowerEdge C6220 platform to the Reference Architecture.
- Dell expands OpenStack market to SMB with new private cloud in a box offering, mHelix, in partnership with Morphlabs
We didn’t stop there. In order to offer our customers end-to-end solutions consisting of hardware, software, training, support, and services, we announced an emerging solutions ecosystem partner program and on-boarded three strategic partners:
- Canonical provides engineering, online and professional services and support for Ubuntu and OpenStack to our customers globally
- enStratus augments our taxonomy to provide self-service portal, virtual machine management, and governance for enterprise-class applications in public, private and hybrid clouds
- Mirantis provides comprehensive OpenStack consulting and engineering services
Dell was one of the original OpenStack partners that participated in the July 2010 launch. Since then, Dell has launched the first OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution in July 2011, and open sourced the Crowbar software. Dell has also been an active participant in the OpenStack community, also a member of the OpenStack foundation sponsoring design summits, helping build user groups, hosting meetups, and delivering training.
We brought our first OpenStack-powered solution to market in July 2011 with the goal of building an operational model, learning customer needs, and focusing on single operator clouds. Based on customer feedback (customers are looking for full solutions), we will continue to bring innovative software and end-to-end solutions for public, private, and hybrid clouds, and expand the market to more regions around the world based on demand. We will also continue our focus on building innovative new features with upcoming releases of OpenStack and build out our partner ecosystem to provide value-added pieces to the Dell Cloud Taxonomy.
More and More Companies Are Using OpenStack
The number of companies jumping on the OpenStack bandwagon is growing by leaps and bounds. Just check out this link: http://www.openstack.org/user-stories/
OpenStack has been the only community-driven, open-source, open-standards cloud stack that is being developed from the ground-up with open API’s, scaleable distributed shared-nothing implementation model, operational best practices, delivery mechanisms, and hypervisors. This approach has the greatest potential to drive interoperability and adoption of clouds.
Customers are seeking alternatives to costly cloud options in market today,. They are seeking cloud solutions that can scale massively and are seeking flexibility to enhance their environments with new features they need when they need them – OpenStack fits this need. It
- Limits costly software licenses
- Limits lock-in by vendors and by providers
- Allows for massive scalability
- Offers standard APIs, enabling growing cloud ecosystem and compatibility
Lean more about how OpenStack is gaining momentum in my previous blog post: http://www.cloudel.com/openstack-is-gaining-momentum-customers-are-speaking-up/
Dell Cloud Taxonomy
Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution contains the core components of a typical OpenStack solution (Nova, Horizon, Swift, Glance, Keystone, Nova-Volume), plus components that that span the entire system (Crowbar, Chef, Nagios, DNS, NTP, etc.).
The OpenStack taxo
nomy presented in the picture below reflects both included infrastructure components (shown in light green) and OpenStack specific components that are under active development (shown in red) by the community, Dell, and Dell partners. The taxonomy reflects a CloudOps perspective that there are two sides for cloud users: standards-based API (shown in pink) interactions and site-specific infrastructure. The standards-based APIs are the same between all OpenStack deployments and let customers and vendor ecosystems operate across multiple clouds. The site-specific infrastructure combines open and proprietary software, Dell hardware, and operational process to deliver cloud resources as a service.
The above OpenStack taxonomy focuses on just the infrastructure pieces of the cloud. However, there is much more to the cloud than this. Ultimately, customers care about applications, data, and workloads. They care about governance. And they want it in the cloud, often in their own private cloud.
The following diagram is our vision of the entire cloud taxonomy – all the pieces that need to come together to have a fully functional enterprise-ready private cloud. Our goal is to help customers get there by building out this taxonomy and by backing it up services, and support – in other words: a full cloud solution.
Full cloud computing taxonomy
Building out a cloud is just a start, customers also need an operational model and automation to efficiently operate their clouds. Crowbar is our model for automating in software the best practices in operations and management. We are already moving ahead with some exciting work around the next generation crowbar some of which is being worked on with the community. See Rob Hirschfeld’s latest blog post: http://robhirschfeld.com/2012/07/09/the-real-workloads-begin-crowbars-sophomore-year/.
Some crowbar roadmap items are available on the github site: https://github.com/dellcloudedge/crowbar/wiki/Roadmap
I anticipate that today’s launch will help accelerate OpenStack adoption in the market.
If you’re interested in learning more about what Dell is doing with OpenStack, and more on the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution, you can visit www.Dell.com/OpenStack or drop us an email at OpenStack@Dell.com.
Until Later
Kamesh
Twitter: @kpemmaraju
