Cybera, a Canadian not-for-profit recently selected OpenStack along with Dell systems to build out their Infrastructure as a Service cloud. The organization, which is based in Alberta, “collaborates with public and private sector partners to accelerate research and product development that meets the needs of today’s society.”
Most recently Cybera used OpenStack to build out a cloud for CANARIE’s (Canada’s Advanced Research and Innovation Network) DAIR project.
Here’s what Cybera had to say in their blog:
To start with, you’ll need hardware. If you have the time and inclination, the best thing to do might be to ask Rackspace Cloud Builders for some help spec’ing out the hardware for OpenStack. This is the route that Cybera went and we got some badly needed advice. Since you might not be able to go that route, I’ll tell you what we know.
At the end of the day we went with Dell, based on the Cloud Builders’ advice and our own due diligence. If you aren’t aware of it yet, Dell is supporting OpenStack in a big way. They have a number of pages dedicated to it here. There’s also a whitepaper that discusses hardware and network for OpenStack, if you feel like filling out the form.
We ordered four different types of servers (aka nodes). A management node (nova-api, nova-network, nova-scheduler, nova-objectstore), compute nodes (nova-compute, nova-volume), a proxy node (swift-proxy-server) and storage nodes (swift-object-*, swift-container-*, swift-account-*). All nodes were contained in the Dell C6100 chassis. Here are the specs:
| Processor | Sockets | Cores | Threads | RAM | Disk | |
| Management | E5620 | 2 | 8 | 16 | 24 | 8 x 300 GB |
| Compute | X5650 | 2 | 12 | 24 | 96 | 6 x 500 GB |
| Proxy | E5620 | 2 | 8 | 16 | 24 | 4 x 300 GB |
| Storage | E5620 | 2 | 8 | 16 | 24 | 6 x 2 TB |
Great to see people picking up OpenStack and running with it!
Read more about Cybera’s experience at Running OpenStack in Production: Part 1: Hardware
Pau for now…
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