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Pictures, Videos, Highlights from the OpenStack Havana Summit Portland

admin — Thu, 02 May 2013 14:36:52 +0000

The OpenStack conference in Portland saw almost 3000 attendees, more than double the last summit in San Diego just six months ago. As it happened in San Diego, people continued to come in on the first two days of the conference without pre-registrations and were allowed to register at the last minute and allowed to join the summit. Even with large rooms, most of the sessions were overflowing with people – standing room only. The Portland Convention center worked well for the event, even if the rooms were unable to handle the masses.

There were a lot of great sessions going on and it was difficult to attend them as there so many of them. There were definitely different types of audiences in this conference: developers, users, operations folks, and many many newcomers to OpenStack. In fact, more than 70% of hands went up when the organizers asked (at the first day introduction gathering) how many were first-timers to the summit!

More and More Production Deployments and User Stories!

As the number of user stories grows, many enterprises will begin to get the confidence they need to deploy this into production environments. At this Summit, we heard great stories directly from large enterprises including Bestbuy, Paypal, Comcast, Bloomberg, Samsung and many others about their experiences with OpenStack deployments.

The OpenStack User Committee‘s survey of more than 400 OpenStack users produced some really interesting insights into real deployments of OpenStack. For example, the results showed nearly 100 production deployments out there from this limited sample survey. I’m sure there are many many more happening around the world.

Media analysis reports continue to show that OpenStack is beating the competition 2:1 in media mentions and coverage:

All About Grizzly

The latest OpenStack Grizzly release is yet another milestone in preparing this unstoppable Open Source project for mainstream enterprise use. You can get all the details about the Grizzly release here including the new features here.

Documentation of the project has been vastly improved in Grizzly. The crown jewel of documentation has got to be the OpenStack Operations Guide which was completed in a record 5 days. This is an amazing achievement given the very high quality of this document. This is a great example of open source collaboration with the right experts working together to produce something extremely useful to thousands of users and operators of OpenStack. See a video on the panel discussion around this topic.

Pictures from Portland

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Dell Team’s Session Videos

Our Dell team was present in full force, running sessions and panels, and talking to customers and partners. Check out videos below of the sessions that our team was involved in: (The organizers did a great job video recording the keynotes and ALL of the sessions. All of these are available at: http://www.openstack.org/summit/portland-2013/session-videos/?day=1

Getting From Grizzly to Havana: A DevOps Upgrade Pattern

Rob Hirschfeld — Principle Cloud Architect at Dell

Upgrade Orchestrations are essential! We’re both delighted and frustrated by OpenStack’s pace of innovation because by the time we get the current release working then new hotness arrives. Last year, it was enough to just install OpenStack, but now we think it’s required to have an upgrade plan. As the founders of Crowbar, we are leaders in the cookbook design for OpenStack and have a lot of experience with orchestration for OpenStack deployments. This community discussion about our proposed upgrade pattern reviews our devops recommendations (do NOT mix cookbooks for multiple releases) and orchestration design (dedicated cookbooks for orchestration). If you’re interested in cookbooks that are testable and minimize complexity then this session is for you! We want orchestrations between versions that can focus on the specific use-cases around the migration scenarios like incremental, fastest-possible, change of operating system, or VM migration. If you agree that migrations between versions are also very important then look no farther!

Heat RefStack – A Reference Implementation for Openstack

Rob Hirschfeld — Principle Cloud Architect at Dell,

Monty Tailor, HP

The OpenStack project does an insane amount of automated testing as part of the development cycle, but up until now there has been no corresponding testing that can be performed against running public clouds. While we want to do that, before we can test other people’s clouds for compatibility, we need to be able to express what it is they need to be compatible with.

Enter RefStack

It turns out that OpenStack is rich enough now to express a reference implementation in terms of itself, using heat templates. Some people think that’s a great end to itself – deploy your OpenStack using OpenStack – but others are not quite as sure about that yet, and have significant investment in things like chef, puppet, crowbar or cobbler. To meet the needs of expressing a useful set of testable information and not leave that specification as an academic exercise, or as the recipient of more tool wars – we’ve come up with a plan to have the heat templates describe the state, the “what” if you will, and to describe a clear boundary line across which metadata is passed to the tools on the individual nodes that will turn that metadata into configuration.

Over the course of the talk, we’ll discuss:

refstack itself
heat template design
crowbar integration
os-config-applier

Best Practices for Integrating a Third Party Portal with OpenStack

Campbell McNeill — Lead Cloud Architect at Dell,

Using OpenStack in the context of a cloud service provider carries some considerations. A key differentiator is user experience and in order to provide as a service.

In this session we will discuss the key differentiations required from a portal, based on the target audiences of the platform, a reference architecture for the inclusion of business support services, key OpenStack components and how they are included in this architecture and some best practices for improving user experiences around OpenStack.

Wicked Easy Ceph Block Storage & OpenStack Deployment with Crowbar

Kamesh Pemmaraju — Senior Product Manager, Cloud Solutions at Dell, and Neil Levine, VP Product, Inktank

Inktank Ceph is a transformational open source storage solution fully integrated into OpenStack providing scalable object and block storage (via Cinder) using commodity servers. The Ceph solution is resilient to failures, uses storage efficiently, and performs well under a variety of VM Workloads.

Dell Crowbar is an open source software framework that can automatically deploy Ceph and OpenStack on bare metal servers in a matter of hours. The Ceph team worked with Dell to create a Ceph barclamp (a crowbar extention) that integrates Glance, Cinder, and Nova-Volume. As a result, it is lot faster and easier to install, configure, and manage a sizable OpenStack and Ceph cluster that is tightly integrated and cost-optimized.

Hear how OpenStack users can address their storage deployment challenges:

Considerations when selecting a cloud storage system
Overview of the Ceph architecture with unique features and benefits
Overview of Dell Crowbar and how it can automate and simplify Ceph/OpenStack deployments
Best practices in deploying cloud storage with Ceph and OpenStack

Co-presented by Kamesh Pemmaraju, Product Manager from Dell and Neil Levine from Inktank.

And here are the slides from this presentation:

Wicked Easy Ceph Block Storage & OpenStack Deployment with Crowbar from Kamesh Pemmaraju

Hadoop for OpenStack Log Analysis

Mike Pittaro — Principal Architect, Big Data Solutions at Dell, Inc.

Let’s discuss Hadoop for OpenStacklog analysis! Hadoop can support operational monitoring, troubleshooting, and capacity planning in a consistent and open way. We’ll share the work we’ve started, and lead an interactive discussion of different approaches already in play. Our goal is to collaborate on the best patterns for different deployment environments. The presentation will focus on the structure and analysis of OpenStack log data with Hadoop, and what value exists in the data. Our intent is to have an open discussion around what what we have found, what others have done, and what the emerging patterns are.

We’re not going to spend a lot of time discussing the logistics of log collection and loading, since that is a well understood problem

Ops Panel: Infrastructure Reference

Randy Perryman — Senior Network and Security Engineer is a panel member along with other panel members from CloudScaling, HP, and CISCO

Join this panel of infrastructure and cloud hardware experts in a spirited discussion about what works (and what does not) for OpenStack deployments. We’ve assembled hardware and solution vendors together in a panel so that operators can learn from their field experience. We’ll also be hearing about what makes individual offerings advantaged for OpenStack and how to build a cloud that can scale.

Expanding the community reach through user groups and universities

Kamesh Pemmaraju — Senior Product Manager, Cloud Solutions at Dell is a panel member along with other panel members from Cisco, Yahoo, and UTSA

In this panel discussion, we’ll discuss experiences to date and near-term plans for expanding the community through user groups and universities.

In addition to all the above sessions, Dell led a thought-leadership panel in a breakout session to discuss Software Defined Networking. See details below:

SDN and OpenStack: Shaping the Future of Cloud Networking Innovation

Wednesday April 17, 2013 3:40pm – 4:20pm
A107+108+109 (Oregon Convention Center) (777 NE Martin Luther King Jr Blvd Portland, OR 97232)

ABSTRACT:

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a hotbed of activity with established players as well as well-funded start-ups tackling the largely unsolved problem of large-scale network virtualization in cloud deployments. OpenStack Quantum provides the foundational interfaces to bring in SDN technologies to the OpenStack environment. The ultimate goal is to finally free applications from being aware of specific networking details (like ports, IP addresses etc) and at the same time reducing the operational costs of managing the switching fabric in the era of cloud and mobile computing. Companies have a variety of approaches and solutions to this. In this panel discussion, Dell will moderate a discussion with experts from Big Switch, Midokura, Dell and others on the evolution of this exciting new space and it relevance within the OpenStack context.

OPENING REMARKS:

Joseph George, Moderator (Dell)
Background and purpose of the panel
Panel member introductions

OBJECTIVES:

What we want the audience to walk away with from the session:

Help the audience understand SDN use cases and how it can help with their networking requirements
Understand why and how SDN is important for the adoption of OpenStack and how it will evolve to address the unique needs and requirements of different target marketplaces

AGENDA:

Dell Introduction (5 minutes)
Why SDN matters
Where we are in the market place with SDN (a bit of history and some thoughts on future evolution)
Introduce the panel members
Panel Discussions (25 minutes): Areas to cover
Audience Q & A (10 mins)

More OpenStack Discussions in the Boston OpenStack Meetup Group

We will be discussing more about the Summit including a couple of other interesting topics (Tempest and SUSE cloud) in the upcoming OpenStack Boston usergroup meetup on 6 May 2013 at the Microsoft NERD center in Cambridge, MA. If you are in the area, we would love to see you there! Reserve your seat today: http://www.meetup.com/Openstack-Boston/events/115948472/

OpenStack Havana Summit, Portland, Join Dell For the Discussions and Party!

admin — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 19:08:03 +0000

Dell is a premier sponsor of the OpenStack Summit this year. We are speaking at a number of sessions and panels where our team of OpenStack experts will share their expertise and experience with the community. If you are there at the Summit, we would love to see you at the various events we are engaged in

Our team is at the event in full force. Just as in the past conferences, we are actively engaging with the OpenStack community and ecosystem in a number of different ways. You will get to play some games running on OpenStack at the Dell booth, not to mention get a hands-on experience with the ultra-sleek Sputnik Dell laptop. We hope to see you there soon!

Checkout the Dell OpenStack graphic in the booth.

We are privileged to have several talks from our team selected for presentations. See below of the description of these sessions.

Getting From Grizzly to Havana: A DevOps Upgrade Pattern

Rob Hirschfeld — Principle Cloud Architect at Dell

Heat RefStack – A Reference Implementation for Openstack

Rob Hirschfeld — Principle Cloud Architect at Dell,

Monty Tailor, HP

Enter RefStack

Over the course of the talk, we’ll discuss:

refstack itself
heat template design
crowbar integration
os-config-applier

Best Practices for Integrating a Third Party Portal with OpenStack

Campbell McNeill — Lead Cloud Architect at Dell,

Using OpenStack in the context of a cloud service provider carries some considerations. A key differentiator is user experience and in order to provide as a service.

Wicked Easy Ceph Block Storage & OpenStack Deployment with Crowbar

Kamesh Pemmaraju — Senior Product Manager, Cloud Solutions at Dell, and Neil Levine, VP Product, Inktank

Hear how OpenStack users can address their storage deployment challenges:

Considerations when selecting a cloud storage system
Overview of the Ceph architecture with unique features and benefits
Overview of Dell Crowbar and how it can automate and simplify Ceph/OpenStack deployments
Best practices in deploying cloud storage with Ceph and OpenStack

Co-presented by Kamesh Pemmaraju, Product Manager from Dell and Miroslav Klivansky, Technical Marketing Engineer from Inktank.

Hadoop for OpenStack Log Analysis

Mike Pittaro — Principal Architect, Big Data Solutions at Dell, Inc.

We’re not going to spend a lot of time discussing the logistics of log collection and loading, since that is a well understood problem

Ops Panel: Infrastructure Reference

Randy Perryman — Senior Network and Security Engineer is a panel member along with other panel members from CloudScaling, HP, and CISCO

Expanding the community reach through user groups and universities

Kamesh Pemmaraju — Senior Product Manager, Cloud Solutions at Dell is a panel member along with other panel members from Cisco, Yahoo, and UTSA

In this panel discussion, we’ll discuss experiences to date and near-term plans for expanding the community through user groups and universities.

In addition to all the above session, Dell is leading a though-leadership panel in a breakout session to discuss Software Defined Networking. See details below:

SDN and OpenStack: Shaping the Future of Cloud Networking Innovation

Wednesday April 17, 2013 3:40pm – 4:20pm
A107+108+109 (Oregon Convention Center) (777 NE Martin Luther King Jr Blvd Portland, OR 97232)

ABSTRACT:

OPENING REMARKS:

Joseph George, Moderator (Dell)
Background and purpose of the panel
Panel member introductions

OBJECTIVES:

What we want the audience to walk away with from the session:

Help the audience understand SDN use cases and how it can help with their networking requirements
Understand why and how SDN is important for the adoption of OpenStack and how it will evolve to address the unique needs and requirements of different target marketplaces

AGENDA:

Dell Introduction (5 minutes)
Why SDN matters
Where we are in the market place with SDN (a bit of history and some thoughts on future evolution)
Introduce the panel members
Panel Discussions (25 minutes): Areas to cover
Audience Q & A (10 mins)

Unfortunately, entry to the party co-hosted by Mirantis and Dell on Monday night is sold out. But if you already got in, see you there!!

I will be blogging live from the Summit and will post pictures and important observations. Stay tuned and check this space next week!

OpenStack Havana Summit – Are You Ready?

admin — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 16:48:42 +0000

OpenStack Grizzly is close to feature freeze and is marching towards release in early April. The following release will be named Havana after an incorporated community name in Oregon, not the Cuban city which is famous for its Cigars.

The OpenStack Name Progression During the Growth Years

In case you have not been following the progression of OpenStack names,releases, and summit venues here’s a run down: Born in Texas with the A release (city of Austin, TX) and growing up in Texas through the infant years with the B release (San Antonio, Bexar county, TX), and C release (city of Cactus, TX), OpenStack then took flight out of its birth state to California with the D release (Diablo, CA is a city near Santa Clara). After a brief stopover in Massachusetts with the E release (Essex is a city near Boston, MA), OpenStack landed back in CA with the F release (city Folsom, CA). The upcoming Grizzly release is an element of the state flag of California with the last design summit taking place in San Diego California.

With Havana, OpenStack is Ready to Take on the World

It’s safe to say OpenStack is coming on its own, having passed its teen years, maturing and getting ready to serve its community in earnest. Welcome to Portland, Oregon (it had to be Oregon, of course!). The venue for the next OpenStack Summit, April 15-18, 2013. In keeping with the more than 50% growth of attendance and size of the OpenStack conference/Summit each year, this one promises to be the largest yet with more than 2000 attendees expected to show up.

OpenStack is Winning the Media Battle

The fact that OpenStack momentum is building at an unprecedented rate was reinforced at the last OpenStack board meeting: https://speakerdeck.com/openstack/openstack-q4-2012-media-analysis

It shows that OpenStack has crushed the other open source clouds such as Eucalyptus and CloudStack and is more popular than Amazon EC2 in press mentions.

The Havana Summit: Time to Vote for Speaker Submissions

Dell is once again key sponsor of the OpenStack Summit this year. Our team has submitted a number of speaking sessions including some from yours truly. See below for abstracts and links we have submitted.

You need to be a OpenStack foundation member to vote on all the article submissions (and no you don’t need to register for the summit). If you are not a member, you can join here for free.

And finally, if you are at the Summit, we would love to see you at the various events and speaking sessions (if voted on to speak) we are engaged in. I will provides an updated blog post with all the slides and videos from the selected sessions after the Summit.

Openstack Continuous Deployment

andi abes — Sr. Software Engineer at Dell

Let’s eliminate the lag between coding and deploying, and make sure that when we call a release done, users can … use it. The rapid pace of code development and feature addition to Openstack projects leaves our users in the dust. Without a proven, tested method to deploy the latest bits, the goodness of code is of no use to users. As features are added, let’s make sure that old deployment methods still work, and if they don’t we can identify the required changes. (Trunk gate comes to mind!) To achieve that, we can’t wait for Distros to package the code…. Test code as it comes in , and validate both the code and its deployment using methods that worked for the H-1 release. Breaks found in the deployment are breaks speared of the users.

This session will describe a deployment pattern that can achieve this (We the Crowbar Team call Pull-From-Source). This pattern uses the production deployment form release H-1 to deploy the most recent gerrit snapshot, and validate it is functional using Tempest.

This session should be of interested to planning their Openstack deployment strategy, and touches on: tracking releases, incremental upgrades, customer code deployment (e.g. schedulers, drivers).

Getting From Grizzly to Havana: A DevOps Upgrade Pattern

Rob Hirschfeld — Principle Cloud Architect at Dell

OpenStack Reference Architectures Using Heat

Rob Hirschfeld — OpenStack Board Member at OpenStack

To encourage interop and shared open operations practices, the OpenStack community needs strong reference architectures. It was proposed by Rob Hirschfeld & Monty Taylor at the Feb 2013 Board Meeting to begin to describe these using Heat as the lingua clouda for OpenStack RAs. This session will identify the core “flavors” that should be supported and discuss a process by which we can maintain clear and testable Reference Architectures. The benefit of using Heat is that we can build automation that integrates RA tests into the OpenStack CI system. We should also be able to export a deployed system’s Heat mapping to validate that it conforms to known RA flavors.

Crowbar for OpenStack Deployments – the framework behind Dell & SUSE’s OpenStack Powered Cloud Solutiuons

Scott Jensen — Director of Software Engineering at Dell

Crowbar was the first open source OpenStack deployer and been gaining significant traction as the foundation of both Dell and SUSE private clouds. Crowbar makes deployments fast, repeatable and maintainable. This session will give an update about Crowbar’s progress and capabilities such as late-binding deployment and sophisticated network configurations. We’ll take time to explain where Crowbar is going because we’re expanding to include OpenStack upgrades, Puppet support, heterogeneous operating systems, pull from source and dynamic networking.

Automatic Ring Construction and Maintenance

Judd Maltin — Systems Sr. Engineer at Dell, Inc.

The ring is the heart of Swift, but correctly populating it, and keeping it up to date is currently left for manual intervention.

This session is intended to discuss approaches to automating initial ring construction, as well as consideration in maintaining the ring.

Initial construction maps available disks to zones in the ring. Disk removal and addition trigger swift activity try to achieve the desired replica count and weight balance across the cluster.

This activity can lead to replication storms, impacting user experience. During the session we’ll discuss best practices and strategies to minimize these impacts.

Finally, we’ll review some extra goodies you can get in your Swift setup by using Dell’s Crowbar OpenStack deployment system.

Wicked Easy Ceph Block Storage & OpenStack Deployment with Crowbar

Kamesh Pemmaraju — Senior Product Manager, Cloud Solutions at Dell

Hear how OpenStack users can address their storage deployment challenges:

Considerations when selecting a cloud storage system
Overview of the Ceph architecture with unique features and benefits
Overview of Dell Crowbar and how it can automate and simplify Ceph/OpenStack deployments
Best practices in deploying cloud storage with Ceph and OpenStack

Co-presented by Kamesh Pemmaraju, Product Manager from Dell and Miroslav Klivansky, Technical Marketing Engineer from Inktank.

Picking Optimum Hardware for OpenStack

Randy Perryman — Sr. Network and Deployment Engineer at Dell, Inc.

Co Presenters: Randy Perryman and Mike Pittaro

It takes experience to run an OpenStack cloud and we’ve been helping users select, optimize, and tune OpenStack clouds for 18 months! This session is part of an ongoing dialog about the Dell OpenStack team’s experience deploying in the field. This is a practical field review of what configurations are working in the trenches. We’ll review our past and justify our current advice based on world-wide implementations at hosters, large enterprises, governments and universities. Bring your own opinions – we want this session to get interactive!

Hadoop for OpenStack Log Analysis

Mike Pittaro — Principal Architect, Big Data Solutions at Dell, Inc.

We’re not going to spend a lot of time discussing the logistics of log collection and loading, since that is a well understood problem

Automating Network Configurations for OpenStack

Jaiwant Virk — Product Manager at Dell

Dell has published reference architectures for OpenStack deployments. In order to deploy these reference architectures, Crowbar has been offered as tool for automating the infrastructure readiness. This has primarily been confined to servers and applications in the prior versions. The upcoming version of Crowbar will include a very compelling feature that will automate the discovery and configuration of all the network switches that are part of the reference architecture. This will result in significant task and time compression for OpenStack deployments of all sizes.

OpenStack At Its Fastest

Kamesh Pemmaraju — Senior Product Manager Cloud Solutions at Dell

Co-presented by Kamesh Pemmaraju, Dell and Yoram Heller, Morphlabs

Imagine being able to use OpenStack without having to worry about evaluating, configuring, and deploying a cloud. Imagine not having to deal with hardware, storage, networks, management or maintenance. Imagine getting cost benefits of OpenStack but not having to worry about ease of use, reliability, and support. Imagine OpenStack optimized and integrated. Imagine OpenStack at its fastest

The Morphlabs mCloud Helix, powered by Dell, dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for private clouds. No huge investment in expertise, time, and resources – the benefits of an OpenStack cloud are finally within reach.

In this talk, we will discuss:

Which companies and types of users are utilizing this systems approach and their business reasons for doing so
Specific challenges for developers, IT administrators
Important use cases and target markets
Case Studies!

Summer of Cloud plans and coordination

Rob Hirschfeld — OpenStack Board Member at OpenStack.org

The 2013 SummerOfCloud.org is imagined as virtual internship experience to foster a new generation of cloud developers from the pool of college and high school students. This session is intended to kick off the organization of the effort. We will review and discuss a summer long plan and identify expectations and lay out ground rules for contributors. We need input on effective ways to organize to support both n00b and experienced developers. In addition, we’re seeking 1) OpenStack community members to help mentor the program and 2) sponsors to provide prizes (shirts, laptops, travel) and technical resources (hosting).

Summer of Cloud is NOT a 1×1 mentorship program! The goal is to structure the summer for peer-mentoring with some community support. Ideally, we could have team/project mentors who direct a team toward their objective.

Lessons learned from running and expanding OpenStack Meetup Groups around the World

Kamesh Pemmaraju — Senior Product Manager Cloud Solutions at Dell

Dell has initiated and managed several OpenStack meetup groups in Boston, Austin, Ireland, and India. This session will discuss how you can successfully launch a meetup group in your city from conception to your first meetup. We will talk about on how to identify and reach out to your audience, how to select a location that works, how to find sponsors and speakers. As you build and grow your meetup group, you will then need to tackle different challenges such as how to ensure you are addressing the needs of your diverse audience with many different interests, skill levels, needs, and, most importantly, how to maintain a cadence of events with topics that are useful and relevant. When you have multiple meetup groups in different cities, the challenge becomes how do you share content, speakers, and knowledge between regions via virtual events and then, how to coordinate between the organizing members. We will also discuss how to contribute to the new OpenStack user committee that is being established. Throughout the session, we will share lessons learned, best practices, and pitfalls to avoid. A quick note to all: if the User Group you are interested in supporting does not yet exist in your area, finding support from existing groups or your local community is made easy with Meetup: http://meetup.com/create.

What To Consider When You Vendor Wants to Sell You An OpenStack-Based Cloud

Dan Choquette — Director, Cloud & Big Data Solutions Integration at Dell

If you are SMB, Large Enterprise or Service Provider and are considering making the strategic decision of building, managing and delivering an OpenStack-based cloud, what should you look out for? How will this vendor support you in your efforts?

This session will cover the business, operational and high-level technical considerations all customers need to take into account before partnering with a vendor that will help them be sucessful with OpenStack.

Dell takes its OpenStack Commitment to the Next Level

admin — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 17:35:51 +0000

I returned from Dell World 2012 yesterday, which just concluded at the the Austin Convention Center. It was a spectacular event with more than 6,000 attendees, which included customers, partners, and more than 250 global press, analysts and influencers, I won’t rehash the myriad activities, panels, speaking sessions, press announcements etc, all of which you can check out here and here and other extensive coverage of the event online.

Dell World highlights from a cloud perspective

I wanted to share my perspectives and takeaways from the event and emphasize some key areas that are closer to my area of interest and expertise: namely Cloud, Open Source, and OpenStack. (Note: I work for Dell, but these are entirely my opinions and perspectives).

Cloud computing continues to be a disruptive force in the tech industry enabling and accelerating other key trends that our customers are facing today including big data, mobility, and security. It is telling that Dell World focused on these disruptive areas in the market place. The message was loud and clear: Dell is gearing itself up as a company that is ready to provide end-to-end solutions to help customers successfully navigate their businesses through these disruptive forces.

Dell has a number of Cloud offerings in the market including those based on VMWare and Microsoft and will continue to bring these solutions to the market for customers that have specific needs and requirements that are met by those solutions.

But what might have been missed in all this flurry of activities and press announcements is what Dell is doing with Open Source cloud (OpenStack) and big data (Hadoop) offerings. Keep in mind that Dell has been offering a complete private cloud offering based on OpenStack for over a year now and has been very active in the OpenStack community with its ever expanding ecosystem of partners.

Furthermore, Dell Services announcements demonstrate that Dell is taking its commitment to OpenStack to the next level making it a key part of it’s cloud strategy going forward which include public cloud, managed
private clouds, and hybrid cloud based on OpenStack.

For the rest of this blog post, I will focus on some new offerings around ÒpenStack I have been working on for the past few months:

Dell Addresses OpenStack Cloud Storage Challenges with New Options

Storage is currently one of the most challenging components in an OpenStack deployment. Up to now, highly scalable, robust block storage options are limited in OpenStack. While OpenStack Nova-volume and Cinder components provide the necessary interfaces, customers need virtual storage capabilities closer to offerings that are available in the market today. In particular, customers have been asking for the following capabilities within OpenStack.

Persistence–Storage capabilities are persistent by default; virtual machines behave more like traditional servers and do not disappear when you reboot them
Host independence–This enables virtual machine migration; compute and storage resources can be scaled independently; compute hosts can be diskless
Easy snapshots–Snapshots of instances and volumes are easier and act more like backups.
Easy cloning–Images can be cloned very easily and fast
Thin provisioning–available in most virtual storage options in the market today

Enterprise storage platforms need to be modified to support cloud, in order to avoid integration, provisioning and management issues with open source cloud platforms. They also need to scale out cost-effectively to meet exploding storage demands. Customers are interested in adopting the various storage technologies for cloud; block, file, and object-based storage. In addition, customers don’t want to be locked in to expensive legacy architectures that aren’t optimized to provide the appropriate level of performance and reliability for cloud solutions.

Dell is committed to helping customers adopt the right technology for cloud whenever they are ready. To help our customers solve OpenStack storage challenges, Dell has announced new options at Dell World:

EqualLogic connector for customers that are invested in Dell EqualLogic storage arrays, and want to integrate EqualLogic in to OpenStack cloud solutions. The connector enables OpenStack users to connect their virtual machines to persistent volumes stored in EqualLogic arrays. This gives them the high performance and resilient storage that they are familiar with, and allows them to reap the benefits of OpenStack at the same time.
Ceph cloud storage solution from InkTank that is compatible with the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution. Ceph is a universal open source storage offering that provides object, block and filesystem storage in a single system. It delivers massive scalability, no single point of failure, and rapid provisioning and is now available through Dell’s Emerging Solutions Ecosystem. Though provisioning a petabyte-sized Ceph cluster with racks of servers is no easy task, using the Ceph barclamp from the Dell Crowbar software framework, provisioning a Ceph cluster from the bare metal up and integrating with OpenStack is a breeze. It’s fully automated and takes only a few hours. Inktank has made available outstanding videos and documentation to help customers quickly get Ceph working in their environments.

Additionally, Dell is continuing to invest in its own enterprise storage platforms — including Dell Compellent, Dell EqualLogic, and the Dell Fluid File System – to ensure they are optimized to fully leverage the cloud model and the OpenStack framework for the future.

Dell and SUSE announce partnership

SUSE was one of the early pioneers to use Dell crowbar software and launch their OpenStack-based cloud product called SUSE cloud. Launched in August 2012, SUSE Cloud is the first enterprise-ready, private cloud solution to help customers improve resource utilization and speed the delivery of IT services across a secure, compliant and fully supported cloud environment. SUSE Cloud combines the power of the OpenStack project and the flexibility of the Dell Crowbar project with SUSE engineering excellence and support. The result simplifies deployment and ongoing administration of the physical cloud infrastructure so customers have maximum flexibility to configure their clouds to meet specific needs.

We look forward to continue to cement this relationship with SUSE to provide value-added enterprise-ready OpenStack solutions to our customers.

Check out these videos to learn more about these current OpenStack and Hadoop offerings.

2012 has been a great year for OpenStack and customer interest. Here at Dell, we will continue to push the envelop and bring innovative and enterprise-ready offerings to our customers. Looking forward to a fantastic 2013.

Happy Holidays!

Dell and MorphLabs Discuss Private Clouds

admin — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 19:51:22 +0000

In a previous blog post “Dell Expands OpenStack Private Clouds To SMB Customer”, I explained how Dell brought to market (in partnership with Morphlabs) the smallest form factor private cloud solution called mCloud Helix The mCloud Helix’s includes Dell’s PowerEdge C 6220, Dell’s crowbar software, and high-performance SSD technology which provides customers with a compact, price-performant, highly energy efficient private cloud solution.

With a customer, Media Temple, already under its belt, Dell is finding a lot of interest in the market for such pre-integrated and assembled cloud solutions. Using such solutions, customers can get their cloud environments up and running quickly at an affordable price point initially and also get significant TCO savings over a 3 year time period.

I participated in a unique webinar/panel discussion called the Briefing Room hosted byEric Kavanagh of the Bloor Group along with Yoram Heller of Morphlabs and analyst Shawn Rogers.

In this session, I presented about Dell’s unique point of view around bringing complete OpenStack solutions that address the needs of various customers and target markets and then Yoram took a deep dive on the mHelix product itself. This was followed by a Q&A interactive session led by analyst Shawn Rogers.

Check out the slides from this webinar below:

You can download or play the entire WebEx session here:

https://bloorgroup.webex.com/bloorgroup/lsr.php?AT=pb&SP=EC&rID=6032447&rKey=7ea9aef442099b5a

Here’s a video of the demo of the mHelix user interface:

Videos and Pictures from the OpenStack Summit San Diego

admin — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 16:07:40 +0000

The OpenStack conference in San Diego was the biggest I have seen to date. People continued to come in on the first two days of the conference without registrations and were allowed to join in. Originally the conference planned to accommodate 900 people but 1000 had registered two weeks prior to the conference. To top it all, an additional 500 people showed up on day 1 and day 2. The venue was obviously not big enough to handle these masses, so the keynotes and most sessions were overflowing! The organizers managed to handle the food requirements quite well though there was not enough space or tables for everyone.

This is the first time design sessions and user sessions were conducted in parallel in the same venue but were physically separated on two floors. There were a lot of great sessions going on it was difficult to attend them as there so many of them. There were definitely different types of audiences in this conference: developers, users, operations folks, and many many newcomers to OpenStack.

The organizers did a great job video recording the keynotes and many of the sessions. All of these are available at: http://www.youtube.com/user/OpenStackFoundation

Our Dell team was present in full force, running sessions and panels, conducting white board sessions, and talking to customers and partners. Check out these pictures from the Summit and the videos from our sessions below:

Pictures from the Summit

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Videos of Various Sessions By Dell Team

Here are the video recordings of the sessions led by our Dell team:

Getting From Folsom to Grizzley: A DevOps Upgrade Pattern (Discussion)

Greg Althaus

Quantum Fog! Networking for Programatic Overlays (Discussion)

Rob Hirschfeld

It’s time to take Fog to the next level. Fog is the leading Ruby abstraction library for the OpenStack API and it’s embedded in several ecosystem products. With the addition of Quantum, there is a need to extend Fog’s models to comprehend cloud networking. Our vision includes adding both hidden functionality like setting up networks by default and explicit functions that expose the power of elastic networking. The goal of this session is to discuss the best ways to surface this functionality and coordinate development so that we do not duplicate or fork efforts.

Pull from Source in Cookbooks for Folsom Deployment (Demo)

Andi Abes

Let’s eliminate the lag between coding and deploying! As we drive towards DevOps continuous deployment, it makes sense that our deployment scripts should be able to bypass packaging and pull directly from source code. That’s exactly what the Crowbar team has created as an option for Folsom deployments. This is a central use case for feature development because your testing code that is ahead of trunk; however, we see the same use cases for deployments that have bug fixes, proprietary features, pre-release features or any drift from trunk. This feature is the path to get maximum control of your OpenStack deployment.

Crowbar for OpenStack Deployments – the framework behind Dell & SUSE’s OpenStack Powered Cloud Solutions

Scott Jensen

Running OpenStack Meetups and Community Events – Panel

Kamesh Pemmaraju & Shawn Roberts (Yahoo!)

Dell has been successful in establishing and running OpenStack meetup groups and deploy days in multiple cities. Using their experience with such groups, Dell will describe how to generate interest and momentum in building a community in your local region offering best practices and pitfalls to avoid,. We will also describe how to collaborate between regions through virtual events and coordinating meetings members at broader events such as the OpenStack summit/conference. If the User Group you are interested in supporting does not yet exist in your area, finding support from existing groups or your local community is made easy with Meetup: http://meetup.com/create.

Panel Discussion Abstract: OpenStack Distributions: How they will shape the future of OpenStack innovation

October 16, 2:40 – 3:20pm in Manchester F

We are all participating in building OpenStack and just like Linux distributions, which helped would-be Linux users manage the complexity and configuration of myriad libraries, placement of files, and executables to successfully get the system to boot and run, all indications are that OpenStack distributions are poised to help would-be OpenStack users to quickly get a fully-functional and configured cloud up and running. Companies are bringing unique value-added capabilities to the OpenStack core while fully providing enterprise support and services for their distributions. In this panel discussion, Dell will moderate a discussion with experts from Red Hat, Suse, Canonical, and Dell to discuss the importance of OpenStack distributions in the evolution of OpenStack and how they can support the needs of different markets and customer profiles.

Panel Members:

Moderator: Kamesh Pemmaraju (Dell)
Panelists:
- Perry Myers (RedHat)
- Pete Chadwick (Suse)
- Nick Barcet (Canonical)
- Christopher Aedo (Morphlabs)
- Joseph George (Dell)

What we want the audience to walk away from the session:

Help the audience understand how OpenStack distributions can help with their requirements
Understand why and how distributions are important for the adoption of OpenStack and how they will evolve to address the unique needs and requirements of different target marketplaces

Outline:

Dell Introduction (5 minutes)
- Why distros matter
- Where we are in the market place with distributions (a bit of history and some thoughts on future evolution)
- Introduce Canonical, Redhat, and Suse panel members
Panel Discussions (25 minutes): Areas to cover
- Describe your Distro
- Why did you decide on OpenStack as your baseline?
- Who is your target customer? (Possibly highlighting customer use cases as part of the discussion)
- What specific problems are you solving?
- Where do you see OpenStack going and plans with your distribution
- How do you (and your customers) deal with the speed of the OpenStack project?
- How are you enabling customers to move into OpenStack production environment?
- How are you (and your customers) addressing high-availability and fault-tolerance requirements?
Audience Q & A (10 mins)

One of my most popular blog posts was about customer adoption of OpenStack titled OpenStack is gaining momentum: Customers are speaking up from the OpenStack Summit back in April. There is a video of this also available. Check it out:

Dell Expands OpenStack Private Clouds to SMB customers

admin — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 18:12:35 +0000

Small and medium sized businesses (SMB) generally lack expertise, time, and resources to implement cutting-edge private cloud solutions. Such private cloud solutions have been too expensive for SMB, until now. Dell announced today at the OpenStack summit in San Diego:

A new Platform Partner program as an expansion of its Emerging Solutions Ecosystem
An SMB private cloud, mCloud Helix, in partnership with Morphlabs. the first platform partner in the program

Dell was the first to market with an OpenStack-based solution that integrated hardware + software + services, and the first to develop software to provision and deploy OpenStack clouds by way of the Crowbar software framework. We will continue to build our OpenStack ecosystem with a highly-efficient Emerging Solutions Platform Partner Program.

The mCloud Helix’s unique hyperscale architecture merges Dell’s PowerEdge C 6220, Dell’s crowbar software, and high-performance SSD technology which provides customers with a compact, highly energy efficient private cloud solution . Powered by OpenStack, the mCloud Helix solution is the smallest form-factor micro-data center private cloud on the market today. It dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for SMB’s, small departments and single projects within larger companies in the form of a rackable 2U complete private cloud.

Key differentiating features of this new solution includes, but not limited, to the following:

No need to configure SANs and blades, making SAN-speed durable storage affordable for the first time
No complex network configuration
No dense blades, which reduces cost and allows for modular, hyperscale growth
All SSD configuration provides the most price performant infrastructure on the market
Small, power-dense footprint means less operational expenses and green cloud

Ideal for dev/test, server consolidation, and High IOPS use cases, this solution represents a first in the market that addresses the Small and Medium businesses cloud needs.

See a video demo and all the details in this blog post.

OpenStack Grizzly Summit, San Diego, Join Dell For the Discussions and Party!

admin — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 23:28:00 +0000

For the first time, the OpenStack summit (San Diego Oct 15-18) will be running the developer design summit and the user conference in parallel in one location and with one registration system. This is itself is a significant development, as OpenStack use increases in production environments, users will begin to influence the direction and shape of OpenStack going forward.

Whether you want to build the software, run OpenStack, grow the community or just learn more about it, there will be content, workshops and design sessions for you to attend Oct 15-18 in San Diego. On Friday, the OpenStack Community is organizing a 1/2 day service project with the Surfrider Foundation, so try to stick around through Friday and give something back to the host city.

Update: See the pictures and videos from these sessions in this post.

Checkout Our Activities at the OpenStack Summit

Dell is one of the sponsors of the OpenStack Summit this year. We are speaking at a number of sessions and panels this year. If you are here at the Summit, we would love to see you at the various events we are engaged in

Our team is at the event in full force. Just as in the past conferences, we are actively

engaging with the OpenStack community and ecosystem in a number of different ways.

We are privileged to have 5 talks from our team selected for presentations. See below of the description of these sessions. We are also doing some whiteboard sessions at the Dell booth, so come by when you get a chance for a discussion. We hope to see you there soon!

Getting From Folsom to Grizzley: A DevOps Upgrade Pattern (Discussion)

Greg Althaus

Monday, 4:30 – 5:10pm in Manchester D

Quantum Fog! Networking for Programatic Overlays (Discussion)

Rob Hirschfeld

Tuesday, 11:50 - 12:30 in Manchester D

Pull from Source in Cookbooks for Folsom Deployment (Demo)

Andi Abes

Monday, 11:50am – 12:30pm in Manchester D

Crowbar for OpenStack Deployments – the framework behind Dell & SUSE’s OpenStack Powered Cloud Solutions

Scott Jensen

Monday, 9:50 – 10:30am Manchester D

Running OpenStack Meetups and Community Events – Panel

Kamesh Pemmaraju & Shawn Roberts (Yahoo!)

Wednesday, 2:40 – 3:20pm in Manchester F

In addition to the above community selected sessions, Dell is also conducting a break-out session to talk about OpenStack distributions,

Panel Discussion Abstract: OpenStack Distributions: How they will shape the future of OpenStack innovation

October 16, 2:40 – 3:20pm in Manchester F

Panel Members:

Moderator: Kamesh Pemmaraju (Dell)
Panelists:
- Perry Myers (RedHat)
- Pete Chadwick (Suse)
- Nick Barcet (Canonical)
- Joseph George (Dell)

What we want the audience to walk away from the session:

Help the audience understand how OpenStack distributions can help with their requirements
Understand why and how distributions are important for the adoption of OpenStack and how they will evolve to address the unique needs and requirements of different target marketplaces

Outline:

Dell Introduction (5 minutes)
- Why distros matter
- Where we are in the market place with distributions (a bit of history and some thoughts on future evolution)
- Introduce Canonical, Redhat, and Suse panel members
Panel Discussions (25 minutes): Areas to cover
- Describe your Distro
- Why did you decide on OpenStack as your baseline?
- Who is your target customer? (Possibly highlighting customer use cases as part of the discussion)
- What specific problems are you solving?
- Where do you see OpenStack going and plans with your distribution
- How do you (and your customers) deal with the speed of the OpenStack project?
- How are you enabling customers to move into OpenStack production environment?
- How are you (and your customers) addressing high-availability and fault-tolerance requirements?
Audience Q & A (10 mins)

We invite you to the OpenStack Closing Party sponsored by Dell | Morphlabs | Media Temple. We will host all OpenStack attendees at Float in the Hard Rock Café – register now to attend. We hope to see you there soon!

I will be blogging live from the Summit and will post pictures and important observations. Stay tuned and check this space next week!

Freedom in the Clouds: OpenStack Foundation Launch

admin — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 15:18:55 +0000

Since its inception just two years ago, OpenStack has been the model for truly open and free cloud operating system software. Today, September 19, 2012, OpenStack adds yet another feather to its cap. Today marks an important milestone for the OpenStack community and for the open cloud movement: the official launch of the OpenStack Foundation!

Why OpenStack Foundation?

To be truly open and free and not be driven by specific corporate agendas, an open source initiative cannot be controlled by one or two companies. While Rackspace provided great leadership and made OpenStack what it is today, the company wisely realized that to maintain the open spirit of the project, the community needs to shape the future and ensure the growth and success of the fledgling project.

The discussions and participation so far in establishing the foundation structure have been outstanding. The foundation has made great progress in establishing the charter, onboarding members, and creating a board of directors,. The Board is made up of 24 total members, including 8 Individual, 8 Gold and 8 Platinum Directors, each of which represents a different class of members. While the basics are in place, there is still much work to do to ensure the successful execution of the foundation mission, which is to serve and support the community and ecosystem to ensure the growth and success of OpenStack as a ubiquitous cloud computing platform.

The response to the foundation has been truly amazing. Today, the OpenStack Foundation has over 5,600 Individual Members from 88 countries across six continents. These members are come from 850 different organizations are very diverse, ranging from start ups and universities all the way to the world’s largest global enterprises. The foundation has already secured more than $10 million in committed funding as of September 2012 through Member dues and corporate sponsorship.

Dell (the company I work for) was the first tier 1 to launch an OpenStack solution, and as a Gold Member of the OpenStack Foundation, we are looking forward to the continued expansion of our OpenStack involvement and leadership around the world. We have two members on the Board of Directors, which will provide strategic and financial oversight of the OpenStack Foundation.

Looking Back: Success by the Numbers

The success of open source project depends entirely on passionate developers and users, regular release cadence with large code contributions, and user groups and vibrant communities.

These numbers speak for themselves:

OpenStack software has been downloaded more than 300,000 times from the central code repositories, not counting the various distributions
It has more than 550,000 lines of code, written mostly in Python
More than 573 developers have contributed to OpenStack since its inception, with 464 contributing in the last 12 months (http://www.ohloh.net/p/openstack)
Local community leaders have established more than 38 global user groups (http://wiki.openstack.org/OpenStackUserGroups)
There have been more than 1.1M visitors to OpenStack.org

Who is Using OpenStack?

Being first to the market with an complete end-to-end OpenStack solution, our team at Dell has more than 18 months experience with real-word deployments and field experience. As we look at the dozens of customers who have used our solution, we find that OpenStack customers tend to be organizations of every shape and size including the largest global enterprises across multiple verticals, CDN, hosting, and other service providers, social media, eCommerce, media, and gaming companies. Universities and government research institutions are among the early adopters as well.

Among the chief reasons these companies are looking at OpenStack are for control, flexibility, proven scalability, and open standards compatibility.

Boston OpenStack User Group Meetup Celebrates

OpenStack celebrated the Foundation launch party around the world on Sep 19th, 2012, and we joined in the party at the Boston OpenStack User Group meetup. Dell organized the meetup and the pizza and OpenStack Foundation sponsored drinks with an open bar!

We had a great time. Nearly 35 stackers showed up, many of them joining the meetup group for the first time and attending their first meetup. We talked about the foundation and its role, a bit about its history, and where it is going. We also had a lively discussion around experiences and challenges around OpenStack deployments and different types of use cases out there.

Many folks hung around, networking, socializing, and chatting about various things about cloud, OpenStack, and the market until 10 pm that night.

Microsoft provided their wonderful NERD center location for the meetup overlooking the Boston skyline and Charles river. Check out the pictures from this event:

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July Boston OpenStack Meetup Summary

admin — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 17:54:27 +0000

The July Boston OpenStack meetup took place at the Microsoft NERD center in Cambridge last night. The location was gorgeous overlooking the Charles river with a terrific view of the Boston skyline. Check this out:

If you are one of folks who showed up session yesterday, thanks for coming! We had good conversations over Pizza and during the sessions.

OpenStack Update: Growing Up and Getting Ready for Production Environments

OpenStack celebrated it’s second year anniversary least week at OSCON 2012 and continues to rapidly grow its vibrant and collaborative community of developers and users with the accompanying ecosystem of commercial companies including the biggest brand names in the industry (ATT, HP, Dell, Rackspace, Redhat, Suse etc). These numbers speak for themselves:

3386 members and 183 companies
Arguably one of the fastest-growing and largest community of actively contributing developers. For example, in the 84th week of the project, there were 166 entities contributing to the effort whereas it took Linux 828 weeks to hit 180 active contributors, according to Rackspace’s tally.
More than 200,000 downloads from the OpenStack repository, not counting all the distributions by Canonical, Suse, Piston, Cloud Scaling, Fedora, StackOps etc.

Meanwhile, the OpenStack foundation is making rapid progress. The governance documents have been drafted and reviewed and the goal is to have it all done by the next OpenStack summit in Oct. Individual members can now join the foundation. The multi-vendor foundation largely addresses the concern of one company (Rackspace) retaining control over an open source project. Such a model succeeded in the past when IBM gave up control to a multi-vendor foundation for the Eclipse Java project. The things that will make OpenStack momentum going strongly are:

An independent multi-vendor foundation
A carefully-crafted governance model that facilitates community innovation
An active, vocal, and collaborative community of developers

OpenStack provide a great alternative to companies looking for vendor independence, the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of open source, and a 100% true-community driven innovation. Again, the numbers and size of commercial deployments speak for themselves.

There are over 100 commercial clouds running OpenStack today, including ones from AT&T, HP, Deutsche Telekom, DreamHost, Korea Telecom, NTT, and Internap including some very large deployments:

CERN plans to deploy OpenStack across 15,000 nodes in two data centers by 2015 (this could well become the largest OpenStack deployment estimates to run 300,000+ VM’s) (See this presentation for more details)
Argonne National Labs is at least 500 nodes
University of Oregon is over 200 nodes
University of Melbourne in Australia has 1900 instances of Nova
Mercado Libre has over a 1000 node Swift deployment (see this case study by Canonical)
HP has more than 1000 nodes running its public cloud service based on OpenStack (Read how DreamWorks Studios runs its graphics rendering on HP’s OpenStack CLoud)

Deep Dive Into OpenStack KeyStone

Adam Young from RedHat took a deep-dive into OpenStack Authentication solution: KeyStone. What it is, how it works, what it’s good for, what it’s not good for, and features in the latest release and the upcoming release.

Andi Abes from our Dell team walked through a set of considerations for deploying an OpenStack cloud. He covered in a good interactive session a wide range of topics including Dev stack, networking configurations, Dev Ops, Chef, Puppet etc. No slides from Andi, just code snippets and interactions!

If you have suggestions for topic or want to sponsor or participate in the future forums or events – please contact us via Meetup Page Contact Us (It does require you to signup to meetup).

We would like to thank the sponsors of the Meetup again:

Dell (the company I work for) organized this event and flipped the bill for logistics
Cloud Technology Partners sponsored the pizza and drinks
Microsoft provided the NERD center for the event

Our next Meetup will be in August in Newton. Hope to see you there soon. Stay tuned for the details.