PowerEdge C powers OpenStack Install Fest

November 10, 2010

Yesterday morning I made the drive down to San Antonio for OpenStack’s second design summit (and first open to the public).  If you’re not familiar with OpenStack, its an open source cloud platform founded on contributed code from Rackspace and NASA’s Nebula cloud.   The project was kicked off back in July at an inaugural design summit held in Austin.

The project has picked up quite a bit of momentum in its first four months.  Attending this week’s 4-day conference are close to 300 people, representing 90 companies, from 12 countries.  The event is broken into a business track and design track (where actual design decisions are being made and code is being written).

Powering the Install Fest

For the project Dell has sent down a bunch of PowerEdge C servers which have been set-up upstairs on the 5th floor.  OpenStack compute has been installed on the two racks of servers and are up and running.   Tomorrow, coders will get access to these systems during the install fest.   During the fest attendees will each be given a virtual machine on the cloud to test and learn about installing and deploying OpenStack to the cloud.

I got Bret Piatt, who handles Technical Alliances for OpenStack, to take me on a quick tour of the set-up.  Check it out:

Featuring: Brett Piatt, PowerEdge C1100, C2100, C6100 and C6105

Extra-Credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

OpenStack insights and code

August 11, 2010

I’m now at the mid-point of the videos I shot at OSCON Cloud Summit a few weeks ago.  Today’s feature is Brett Piatt from the OpenStack ecosystem development team who has been working on the project since it kicked off nine months ago.  Brett’s particular area of focus is the partners who have joined and are participating in the effort.  I got some of Brett’s time after the cloud summit ended and this is what he had to say:

Some of the topics Brett tackles:

  • Over 20 companies participating from hardware makers to software vendors who help you manage or operate OpenStack, e.g. Cloud kick and Rightscale as well as other service providers (who are actually Rackspace competitors.)
  • The Rackspace API and coupling it with feature releases.
  • The projects near term goal which is to get it in production beyond Rackspace and NASA.
  • What code is available now — OpenStack object storage (aka Swift) which powers Rackspace’s cloud files.
  • The Nova code = Rackspace cloud sw + NASA’s Nebula cloud = Cloud and VM orchestration system management package.  It’s mostly written in Python, some C & C++ as well as a dash of Erlang.  It also has built-in ipad, iphone apps, android apps and web control panel — something for the whole family!

Still to come in my OSCON video series:

  • J.P. Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at BT — Nature doesn’t require SLAs
  • Simon Phipps about his new company ForgeRock

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

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