OSCON: Mark Hinkle on his keynote + Citrix and Open Source

August 9, 2013

Last month at OSCON, after his keynote “Creating communities of Inclusion,” I caught up with Mark Hinkle, Senior Director of Open Source Solutions at Citrix.  We chatted about about the talk he delivered and what he and Citrix are up to in the world of Open Source.

Some of the ground Mark covers:

  • Getting in ruts in the open source community and how we can refactor
  • Open source is not a zero sum game
  • Open source developers are not always the best at asking for help
  • Mass collaboration like that seen in open source can benefit other industries as well

Some of the ground Mark covers:

Extra-credit reading/viewing:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Citrix to launch OpenStack Distro (with a little help from Rackspace and Dell)

May 25, 2011

Today at Citrix Synergy, Citrix announced “Project Olympus,” their up coming OpenStack distribution.  In case you’re not familiar with it, OpenStack is an open source cloud platform based on the code from NASA’s Nebula cloud as well as Rackspace’s storage code.  The OpenStack project kicked of last summer and already has gathered support from over 60 commercial hardware and software vendors.

Mt. Olympus and the Cloud

Citrix’s OpenStack Distro

Citrix’s Project Olympus will produce a commercial distribution of the OpenStack infrastructure-as-a-service platform.  This “Olympian” distribution will be made up of two main components: a Citrix-certified version of OpenStack and a cloud-optimized version of XenServer.  While Citrix will lead with their Xen technology, thanks to OpenStack the distro will support all leading hypervisors.

Project Olympus is targeted at both public cloud providers as well as enterprise customers looking to build out private clouds.  The distribution will be available later this year.

But I want it now — The Citrix/Rackspace/Dell Early Access Program

For those who don’t want to wait until the official distribution is ready, don’t fret you can get started today through the Early Access Program (EAP).  The EAP is designed to help customers kick-off pilots and proof-of-concept deployments.  The program provides access to a beta version of the Citrix distro plus Dell hardware and deployment software as well as deployment services, training and on going customer support for customer clouds via Rackspace’s Cloud Builders program.

To get going with Citrix’s Project Olympus Early Access Program, please visit  http://www.citrix.com/olympus

Dell, Crowbar and Reference Architectures

Dell’s above-mentioned deployment software, aka “crowbar,” was a big hit at the last OpenStack Design summit.  The software which leverages Opscode’s Chef, allows folks to get an Openstack cloud up in running in less than four hours (instead of  days).  In addition to the deployment software and systems, to support the project Olympus EAP, Dell will also be providing reference architectures so keep your eyes peeled for those.

If you have any questions about what Dell is doing with OpenStack or want to get started, email us at OpenStack@Dell.com.

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Citrix “All in” when it comes to OpenStack

November 12, 2010

Today the OpenStack design summit wrapped up down in San Antonio.  The summit featured close to 300 attendees representing 90 different companies.  One of the key partners since the project kicked off back in July has been Citrix.  On Wednesday I caught up with Gordon Mangione, Vice President of cloud at Citrix to get his thoughts on the project and this week’s summit.  Here’s his enthusiastic response:

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Meet OpenStack’s Community Manager

October 6, 2010

One of the key ingredients for the success of any open source project is a strong community manager.  Coming on board to fill that role for the not-quite three-month-old OpenStack project is Stephen Spector. (If you’re not familiar with OpenStack, it’s an open source cloud platform).

Stephen made his first public appearance in his new role today at the Rackspace partner summit in San Antonio.  I was able to catch Stephen first thing this morning before the summit kicked off.

Some of the ground Stephen covers:

  • His background: 14 yrs at Citrix.  He initially ran developer alliance programs.  He spent the last 3yrs running the Xen.org community.
  • Why Stephen joined OpenStack (he jumped at the chance to build a community from scratch).
  • He sees his role as that of a communication conduit
  • One of his first tasks is to find out who makes up the community e.g. developers, users, students, research, partners..
  • He’s very interested in making events like next months design summit successful as well as the importance of globalization.
  • If you have any questions at all regarding the project contact Stephen at stephen.spector@openstack.org

Extra credit reading:

Pau for now..

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Posted by Barton George

Talking to Roger of Citrix about now and Xen

December 11, 2009

Last month at the Interop/Web 2.0 I was able to drag Citrix’s  Roger Klorese away from booth duty for an interview.  Roger is a Sr. Director at Citrix who works on Xen server and the Essentials product family.  Here is what he had to say:

Some of the topics Roger tackles

  • What Roger has been focusing on this year — Free Xen server.  Launching the offering (there have been 200K downloads this year)and then bringing more features into it.  What comes with it for free and what are add-ons that you get thru the Essentials family.
  • In the networking space Citrix announced a version of their netscaler app delivery server as a virtual appliance.
  • Managing “OPVs” (other people’s VM’s)
  • What Roger is most excited about:
    • Growing the datacenter into the cloud  — Xen.org recently released the Xen cloud platform which is a full cloud distro, with a management stack based on open sourcing the Xen server stack.
    • Early next year they are releasing the Xen client type 1, a bare metal client hypervisor.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

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