This afternoon Matt Ray, Technical Evangelist for Opscode, stopped by Dell’s Round Rock HQ to brief a gaggle of folks on what they are up to. Cote arranged the visit as well as one last month with Puppet labs, which I unfortunately wasn’t able to make.
After Matt, with some help from teammates on the phone, briefed the Dell gang I grabbed some time with him to get the 5 minute Reader’s Digest version. Here is the result.
Some of the ground Matt covers:
What are Opscode and Chef?
How did they come to be?
The hosted version of Chef (moving from EC2 to Rackspace)
Here is the last in a series of three short videos around cloud computing put together by Dell and Intel. As I mentioned in the last two entries, these videos are part of larger series around key topics like IT reinvention, the consumerization of IT, social media etc.
This last video features myself, Dell’s former CIO Robin Johnson, VP of Dell’s Enterprise Solutions and Strategy, Praveen Asthana and Donna Troy, VP and GM of Solutions Marketing and Sales at Dell.
Some of the ground we cover
How we define cloud computing
How quickly can you evolve to cloud?
How do you balance your current environment with cloud
Starting your cloud building from a basis of virtualization
Before the holidays I posted the first of three videos that Dell and Intel put together around cloud computing. These videos are part of a larger series around key topics like IT reinvention, the consumerization of IT, social media etc.
This second video features myself, Dell’s VP of Platform marketing Sally Stevens and John Pereira, Intel’s director of data center and hosting.
Some of the ground we cover
Cloud as a component of a larger portfolio of compute models
Small companies and the power of the cloud (Animoto case study)
How much of IT spend goes towards maintenance and how can we lower this
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 46,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 17 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Earlier this year Dell and Intel did a series of videos around key topics like cloud computing, IT reinvention, the consumerization of IT, social media etc. Within these there was a mini-series that dealt with cloud computing that I participated in.
Here is the first one that features Dell’s CIO Robin Johnson, John Pereira, Intel’s director of data center and hosting, Forrest Norrod who is the VP and GM of Dell’s server platform group and myself.
Some of the topics we hit on:
How cloud relates to grid compute
How start-ups and smaller companies leverage the cloud and how that may change as they grow
The benefit of velocity and near instantaneous deployment that cloud brings
The federal government’s “Cloud First” initiative and how that will promote adoption
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.
Last but not least in the 10 interviews I conducted while at Hadoop World is my talk with Splunk‘s CTO and co-founder Erik Swan. If you’re not familiar with Splunk think of it as a search engine for machine data, allowing you to monitor and analyze what goes on in your systems. To learn more, listen to what Erik has to say:
Some of the ground Erik covers:
What is Splunk and what do they do?
(1:43) The announcement they made at Hadoop world about integrating with Hadoop and what that means.
(4:25) How Erik and Rob Das got the the idea to get involved in the wacky world of machine data and to create Splunk.
As I mentioned in my previous entry, the code for the Hadoop barclamps is now available at our github repo.
To help you through the process, Crowbar lead architect Rob Hirschfeld has put together the two videos below. The first, Crowbar Build (on cloud server), shows you how to use a cloud server to create a Crowbar ISO using the standard build process. The second, Advanced Crowbar Build (local) shows how to build a Crowbar v1.2 ISO using advanced techniques on a local desktop using a virtual machine.
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.
I’m getting near the end of the interviews that I did while at Hadoop World earlier this month, just one more after this (with Splunk’s CTO and co-founder).
Today’s entry features a talk I had with Nosh Petigara, director of product strategy at 10gen, the company behind MongoDB.
Some of the ground that Nosh covers
Who is 10gen and what is MongoDB
(0:29) How does Nosh define NoSQL
(1:20) What use cases is Mongo best at
(2:14) Some examples of customers using Mongo (foursquare, Disney and MTV) and what they’re using it for
(3:08) How Mongo and Hadoop work together
(4:03) Whats in Mongo’s future that Nosh is excited about
Extra-credit reading
Mongo Conference: MongoSV (Dec 9 in Silicon valley)
Todd Papaioannou has been in Big Data for a while. He built the original engineering team at Greenplum, worked at Teradata for 5 years and mostly recently, before joining Battery Ventures as an Entrepreneur in Residence, served as Yahoo’s Chief Cloud architect.
I grabbed some time with Mr. P to learn what it means to be an EIR and what he’s seeing in the industry from his vantage point.
Some of the ground Todd covers
Todd’s background
(0:45) What is an Entrepreneur in Residence and how did Todd become one
(2:45) What trends is he seeing in the space and how does he feel the market’s evolving
(4:00) What are his big take aways from this year’s Hadoop World
But wait, there’s more!
Stay tuned for more interviews from last week’s Hadoop world. On tap are:
I’m always interested in what’s happening at Canonical and with Ubuntu. Last week at Hadoop World I ran into a couple of folks from the company (coincidentally both named Mark but neither Mr. Shuttleworth). Mark Mims from the server team was willing to chat so I grabbed some time with him to learn about what he was doing at Hadoop World and what in the heck is this “charming” Juju?
Some of the ground Mark covers
Making the next version of Ubuntu server better for Hadoop and big data
(0:34) What are “charms” and what do they have to do with service orchestration
(2:05) Charm school and learning to write Juju charms
(2:54) Where does “Orchestra” fit in and how can it be used to spin up OpenStack
(3:40) What’s next for Juju
But wait, there’s more!
Stay tuned for more interviews from last week’s Hadoop world. On tap are:
One thing Hadoop isn’t great at right out of the box is data analytics, that’s where a company like Karmasphere comes in. Karmasphere provides business intelligence software that data analysts can use to use to mine the data that Hadoop sucks up.
Last week at Hadoop World I grabbed some time with Karamsphere’s Chairman and co-founder, Martin Hall to learn more about where he and his company play in the wild world of big data.
Some of the ground Martin covers
Where does Karmasphere play in the big data stack, how is it used and by whom
(0:38) Where did the idea for developing Karmasphere come from
(1:58) What is the Karmasphere “secret sauce”
(2:18) What are the main industries and use cases where their offerings are used
(3:40) What can we look forward to in future releases
But wait, there’s more!
Stay tuned for more interviews from last week’s Hadoop world. On tap are: Mark Mims of Canonical, Todd Papaioannou from Battery Ventures, John Gray of Facebook, Erik Swan of Splunk and Nosh Petigara of 10gen/MongoDB.
The next in my series of video interviews from Hadoop World is with Mark Azad who covers technical solutions for Couchbase. If you’re not familiar with Couchbase it’s a NoSQL database provider and the company was formed when, earlier this year, CouchOne and Membase merged.
Here’s what Mark had to say.
Some of the ground Mark covers
What is Couchbase and what is NoSQL
How Couchbase works with Hadoop
What its product line up looks like and his new combined offering coming next year
Some of Couchbase’s customers and how Zynga uses them
What excites Mark the most up the upcoming year in Big Data
Yesterday, Hadoop World 2011 wrapped here in New York. During the event I was able to catch up with a bunch of folks representing a wide variety of members of the ecosystem. On the first day I caught up with Ed Dumbill of O’Reilly Media who writes about big data for O’Reilly Radar and also is the GM for O’Reilly’s big data conference, Strata.
Here’s what Ed had to say.
Some of the ground Ed covers
What is Strata and what does it cover
How will this years conference differ from last
Which customer types are making the best use of Hadoop, will Strata verticalize going forward
What is Ed looking forward to most in the upcoming Strata.
A few hours ago the third annual Hadoop World conference wrapped up here in New York city. It has been a packed couple of days with keynotes, sessions and exhibits from all sorts of folks within the greater big data ecosystem.
I caught up with master of ceremonies and Cloudera CEO Mike Olson to get his thoughts on the event and predictions for next year.
Some of the ground Mike covers:
How this year’s event compares to the first two and how its grown (it ain’t Mikey Rooney anymore)
(2:06) Key trends and customers at the event
(4:02) Mike’s thoughts on the Dell/Cloudera partnership
(5:35) Looking forward to Hadoop world 2012 and where to go next
Stay tuned
If you’re interested in seeing more interviews from Hadoop World 2011 be sure to check back. I have eight other vlogs that I will be posting in the upcoming days with folks from Mongo DB, O’Reilly Media, Facebook, Couchbase, Karmasphere, Splunk, Ubuntu and Battery Ventures.
Yesterday Hadoop World kicked off here in New York city. As part of the opening keynotes, Ping Li of Accel Partners got on stage and announced that they are opening a $100 million dollar fund focusing on big data. If you’re not familiar with Accel, they are the venture capital firm that have invested in such hot companies as Facebook, Cloudera, Couchbase, Groupon and Fusion IO.
I grabbed some time with Ping at the end of the sessions yesterday to learn more about their fund:
Some of the ground Ping covers:
What areas within the data world the fund will focus on.
Who are some of the current players within their portfolio that fall into the big data space.
What trends Ping’s seeing within the field of Big Data.
How to engage with Accel and why it would make sense to work with them.
In the previous entry I mentioned that we have developed and will be opensourcing “barclamps” (modules that sit on top of Crowbar) for: Cloudera CDH/Enterprise, Zookeeper, Pig, Hbase, Flume and Sqoop. All these modules will speed and ease the deployment, configuration and operation of Hadoop clusters.
If you would like to get involved, check out this 1 min video from Rob Hirschfeld talking about how:
It wouldn’t be surprising if you were surprised to learn that Dell is developing software. To say that this is an area we haven’t been known for in the past would be an understatement. While we may not pose a direct threat to Microsoft any time soon, we have been coding in a few focused areas. One of those areas is cloud installation and management and is represented by our project Crowbar. While Crowbar began life simply as a way to install Openstack on Dell hardware, it has expanded from there.
Today’s news is that we have developed and will be opensourcing “barclamps” (modules that sit on top of crowbar) for: Cloudera CDH/Enterprise, Zookeeper, Pig, Hbase, Flume and Sqoop. All these modules will speed and ease the deployment, configuration and operation of Hadoop clusters. But don’t take my word for it. Take a listen to Crowbar’s architect Rob Hirschfeld as he explains Crowbar and today’s announcement:
Posted by Barton George 
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