Yesterday the OpenStack summit kicked off here in Austin, TX. This week’s event is being attended by 7,500 individuals.
To give some perspective on the project’s growth, at the inaugural design summit back in 2010 there were 75 people in attendance. The purpose of this initial invite-only event was to “develop a roadmap for the first release, spec out the software and spend the last two days prototyping and hacking.”
Since that time the project has been spun out of Rackspace and has become an independent foundation and today “Hundreds of the world’s largest brands rely on OpenStack to run their businesses every day.”
Thoughts from day zero
To give you a feel for the project’s origins and what it’s aspirations were at that time, below is a set of interviews conducted at the event with some of the key players.
This first one, which does a good job of setting the stage, is an interview with the initial architect/project lead for OpenStack compute, Rick Clark.
The project has come quite a way since the initial meeting back in 2010 at the Omni hotel here in Austin. It will be interesting to see where it is six years from now.
Last week I participated in Dell World with my trusty Flipcam (yes, I still have one, if it ain’t broke…) and caught a bunch of interviews. Several, not surprisingly, dealt with the cloud space.
The first of these is with Red Hat Sr. Solution Architect, Ian Pilcher who was on the expo floor. Ian was talking to attendees about how Red Hat and Dell are working together in the cloud space. I got him to give a short overview.
Some of the ground Ian covers
How the two companies are working together around OpenStack
What are the use cases he’s seeing for the OpenStack solution
What is Red Hat doing with Docker (Hint: see Atomic Host)
What to expect from Red Hat and Dell vis-a-vis their OpenStack solution
Extra-credit reading
Red Hat goes nuclear in Linux container wars with Atomic Host beta – The Register
In June I got to attend and present at the Harvard University IT Summit. The one-day summit, which brought together the IT departments from the 12 colleges that make up the University, consisted of talks, panels and breakout sessions.
The day kicked off with a keynote from Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen of The Innovator’s Dilemma and “disruptive innovation” fame. Christensen talked about disruption in business as well as disruption in Higher Ed and its threat to institutions like Harvard.
After the keynote there was a CIO panel featuring the CIOs of the various colleges where they discussed their strategic plans. When the panel ended the concurrent sessions began.
My talk (see deck above) was near the end of the day and before the final keynote. I took the attendees through the forces affecting IT in higher education and the value of a cloud brokerage model. In the last part of my presentation I went over three case studies that involved Dell and the setting up of OpenStack-based clouds in higher education.
All-in-all a great event and I hope be going back again next year.
Here is my penultimate post from DevOps Days Austin. Today’s interview features Vann Orton, a Dell Sales Engineer for Dell Cloud Manager. I chatted with Vann about the customers hes been visiting out in the field and what he’s seeing.
Some of the ground Vann covers
What’s Dell Cloud manager do and what pains does it address for customers
How Vann used Chef to connect Dell Cloud Manager and Foglight
What customers are facing as they look to implement cloud and how he shares Dell’s learning’s from implementing our own cloud.
How the conversation evolves into the higher order concern regarding business transformation and shifting to a services model.
Still to come: last but not least: Cote’s DevOps Days keynote.
Mark Stouse of BMC has asked various people in the industry to answer seven short questions for his series Marking Predictions for 14. The questions are around Cloud Computing, Big Data and Consumerization.
To give you a taste of what I was thinking about, here is my response to the second question and why I think Consumerization is a big deal:
Cloud Computing, Big Data or Consumerization: which trend do you feel is having the most impact on IT today and why?
Consumerization, because it sets the bar for how technology should look and be designed. Workers want technology in the workplace that is as easy to use and intuitive as the consumer applications and tech products they use at home. Consumerization has set a high bar for IT but one that I believe will ultimately benefit all involved through greater adoption, satisfaction and productivity.
You can see my complete responses on Mark’s blog and learn, among other things, why I think Tony Stark is like big data.
On Thursday, January 23 Dell services will be hosting a think tank in Silicon Valley at the venture capital firm NEA. While hosted in the Bay Area, the event will be streamed live for viewing around the world.
The title of the Think Tank is “The new age of apps and delivery gaps” and we have put together a group of 10 panelist that we feel represents a cross-section of technology and IT today:
Barry Libenson-SVP and CIO, Safeway
Jay Ferro – CIO, American Cancer Society
Ranga Jayaraman- Associate Dean & CIO, Stanford GSB
Luke Kanies – Founder & CEO, Puppet Labs
Alex Salazar – Co-Founder & CEO, Stormpath
Alex Williams – Blogger & Journalist, TechCrunch
Michael Cote – Research Director, Infrastructure Software at 451 Research
Sarah Novotny- Tech Evangelist, NGINX
Das Kamhout – IT Principal Engineer, Intel
Jimmy Pike – Sr. Fellow and Chief Architect, Dell
I will be acting as the moderator of the panel.
Join in
The event will begin at 9AM Pacific Time, and last for three and a half hours. The event will be divided into two main sessions and we’ll discuss such topics as the influence of application developers, the changing role of the CIO and why firms need to build API strategies (see the session outlines below for more details) You can follow and contribute questions and comments via Twitter at #TheAppGap. Hope you can make it!
Session Outlines
Session 1- Welcome to the application-centric world – best practices in the ‘greenfield’
The rise of cloud applications force companies to reevaluate their business architectures. Leveraging new platforms, organizations can operate more efficiently, better engage with customers, and introduce innovative products and services faster than ever before. In this session we’ll discuss and debate how to effectively leverage the best of today’s advanced (digital) technologies and capitalize on the opportunity for a ‘greenfield’ approach.
*Questions
What would you do different to be ready for the digital age? Entrepreneurs starting a company today, what are the architecture and design choices you’d recommend?
What plans would you put in place to leverage cloud, big data, mobile and social media? What would your API strategy be?
How would you plan for growth over a 3-5 year horizon?
Session 2: Nexus of forces – CIOs under pressure and the rise of the enterprise developer
While CIOs are under pressure to reduce costs and improve efficiency, enterprise developers have become the new ‘kingmakers’ leading product development and customer applications. Our experts will share experiences in managing these complex stakeholder relationships, brainstorm the way out from technical debt and examine the possibilities within existing applications.
*Questions:
How do organizations evolve legacy existing environments to take advantage of emerging trends – what are the breakthrough processes and technologies?
What does the CIO needs to do to re-connect with business leaders and organizational strategies? What roles do CIOs, CTOs, business and developers play?
How do established companies take advantage of the changes that are happening today? i.e. private/public cloud strategies, apps modernization, leveraging new architectures, API strategies.
At Venture Beat’s CloudBeat I moderated two panels, the first was with PayPal and Puppet Labs and the second was with Disney, CloudStack and SwiftStack.
After the Disney panel I grabbed some time with SwiftStack’s CEO and Founder Joe Arnold. SwiftStack is based on the OpenStack storage project, Swift, and helps operations teams implement and manage an easy-to-use, multi-tenant and highly scalable private cloud storage platform.
Take a listen to what Joe has to say:
Some of the ground Joe covers
[0:20] What is SwiftStack?
[0:56] Where did Joe get the idea for SwiftStack
[2:15] What additional pieces does Swift Stack add to OpenStack’s Swift project?
[3:26] What is coming down the pipe? (Spoiler alert, it has to do with Erasure coding and Storage policy)
Extra-credit reading
Full Support for Global Clusters Now Available in OpenStack Object Storage – Syscon media
Last week I was out in San Francisco for VentureBeat’s CloudBeat conference. One of the panels I sat in on was “API’s the Key that Unlocks the Cloud.” After it ended I grabbed some time with panelist John Musser, founder of the web’s API directory ProgrammableWeb. John shared his views on APIs past, present and future.
Take a listen.
Some of the ground John covers:
What is ProgrammableWeb and how did John get into the world of APIs
How would John describe the modern API and how is different from integration technology of the past?
What makes a good API and how do you make sure it flourishes? (Time to first “Hello world”)
Who are doing the best jobs with APIs (spoiler alert: Twilio and Stripe)
Stay tuned for the next week or so as I roll out the rest of the interviews I conducted at CloudBeat. On deck are Linkedin’s use of Dell Boomi and Salesforce, Luke Kanies — Puppet CEO, Joe Arnold – CEO of SwiftStack and Anand Iyengar – Founder of CloudVelocity.
In addition to talking about Project Sputnik, we gave away three of the XPS 13 developer edition systems. Here is the crowd waiting for us to draw the winner at the Dell booth:
The Sputnik drawing at the Dell booth.
And here is the lucky winner, Katrina Prosise, a comp sci student in Portland.
L->R: Barton George (Dell), Katrina Prosise (the lucky winner), Joseph George (Dell)
Stay tuned to this blog over the next week or so as I will be sharing a bunch of the video interviews I conducted while at OSCON.
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
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
One of the interviews I did at Dell World was a video with IT in Canada. I did the video with Paul Cooper, Dell’s country manager for Canada.
In the first half of the video I talk about how Dell got into the cloud and where we play in the space. In the second half Paul talks about the roll the telcos will play in the delivery of cloud services in Canada as well as issues around privacy and data sovereignty.
Check it out.
From the article itself, here’s a great summary of our cloud participation and shows how we have built, bought and partnered along the way:
Dell’s excursion into cloud began with organic development of server and data centre capability in specialized systems to meet the needs of large cloud providers (Facebook, Microsoft Azure and Bing), progressed through modification of these systems for marketing to the “next 1,000”, and shifted to partnership with software makers such as Joyent to develop complete cloud solutions, and with companies such as VMware for the creation of a full service public cloud offering.
Supporting acquisitions along the way include companies with specific capabilities such as SecureWorks, which was purchased to address web security concerns that continue to dog broader cloud adoption, and BOOMI, a specialist in cloud integration, which enables Dell to better service customers who adopt a hybrid cloud approach to sourcing compute resources.
Last week at OSCON in Portland, I dragged Josh McKenty away from the OpenStack one-year anniversary (that’s what Josh is referring to at the very end of the interview) to do a quick video. Josh, who headed up NASA’s Nebula tech team and has been very involved with OpenStack from the very beginning has recently announced Piston, a startup that will productize OpenStack for enterprises.
Here is what the always entertaining Josh had to say:
Some of the ground Josh covers:
What, in a nutshell, will Piston be offering?
Josh’s work at NASA and how got involved in OpenStack
Timing around Piston’s general release and GA
The roles he plays on the OpenStack boards
What their offering will have right out of the shoot and their focus on big data going forward
Last week Dell was out in force at the Cloud Computing Expo in New York as the event’s diamond sponsor. Besides the Keynote that President of Dell services Steve Schuckenbrock delivered, Dell also gave, or participated in 11 other talks.
I also gave one the talks and mine focused on the revolutionary approach to the cloud and talked about how this approach was setting a new bar for IT efficiency.
Here’s the deck:
(If the embedded deck doesn’t appear above, you can go to it directly on slideshare).
Talking with Press and Analysts
At the event I also met with press and analysts. One of the things I find helpful in explaining Dell’s strategy and approach to the cloud is to sketch it out for someone real time. I guess analysts Chris Gaun and Tony Iams of Ideas International found it helpful since they both tweeted a picture of it :).
Besides analysts I also met with several individuals from the press. Mark Bilger, CTO of Dell services and I met with Michael Vizard of IT Business Edge and it resulted in the following article Cloud Computing Starts to Get a Little Foggy.
Additionally, to support the event and Dell’s cloud efforts going forward, Dell launched the Dell in the Clouds site. It’s pretty cool, you may just want to check it out.
Extra-credit reading (all my posts from Cloud Expo):
Earlier today at Cloud Computing Expo here in New York, Boomi CTO Rick Nucci conducted a session entitled “Cloud Integration: Best practices for IT Executives.” Rick did a great job sketching out the issues to consider and what to take into account with regards to integration. The most compelling part of the talk, however came from Pradip Sitaram, CIO of Enterprise Business Partners and Boomi customer. Enterprise is a not-for-profit that builds affordable housing across the U.S.
After Pradip got off stage I sat down with him and got him to give a condensed version of his talk:
Some of the ground Pradip covers:
Enterprise homes house over 1 million people and every 55 minutes somebody moves into an enterprise home.
Dealing with the financial and occupancy reports that come from over 1600 properties, on a daily, monthly and yearly basis. How Boomi provided a solution to dealing with and managing these reports that was a fraction of the quote from the other vendor, and could be implemented in weeks instead of months.
Their longer term issue of dealing with over 70 databases that are out dated and need to be modernized. The answer is to go to the cloud and Boomi will act as their strategic integration platform making sure that all the pieces old and new work together.
Today, day one of the Cloud Computing Expo kicked off here at the Javits center in New York city. The event began with a keynote delivered by Steve Schuckenbrock, president of Dell Services. Dell is the Diamond sponsor at the event and Steve talked about finding the real business value in cloud computing and the business of “Yes, now“.
Another of today’s speaker was the founder and CTO of Boomi, Rick Nucci. Boomi provides a SaaS-based cloud integration offering and was acquired by Dell about six months ago. After Rick finished his session I grabbed some time with him to learn more Boomi.
Some of the ground Rick covers:
What Boomi is and how it got started in the integration space back in 2000.
[01:05] How Boomi’s integration offering evolved from a traditional middleware approach to cloud-based.
[02:51] How being acquired by Dell has changed how Boomi run’s its business and serves its customers.
As a part of Intel’s Cloud Builder program, of which Dell is a member, Intel is hosting a podcast series appropriately entitled, Intel Conversations in the Cloud. The first vendor they featured in the series was Dell and, back in March, I had the honor of representing us.
Savtira Corporation, who provides outsourced Cloud Commerce solutions, has chosen Dell DCS’s PowerEdge C line of servers and solutions to deliver streamed media and apps from the cloud. Dell’s gear will help power the Savtira Cloud Commerce platform and Entertainment Distribution Network (EDN).
With a little help from PowerEdge C, businesses will now be able to use EDN to stream all digital media (business apps, games, music, movies audio/ebooks) from the cloud to any device. One of the particularly cool features is, since the state and configuration are cloud-based, consumers can switch between devices and pick up exactly where they pushed pause on the last device.
Talk about supercharging
To power Savtira’s EDN data center, the company picked PowerEdge C410xs packed with NVidia Tesla M2070 GPUs and driven by PowerEdge C6145s. If you think GPUs are just for rendering first-person shooters, think again. GPUs can also cost-effectively supercharge your compute-intensive solution by offloading a lot of the processing from the main CPUs. According to NVidia, for 1/10 the cost and with only 1/20 of the power consumption, GPUs deliver the same performance as CPUs.
To help you get an idea of the muscle behind this solution, the PowerEdge C410x PCIe expansion chassis holds up to 16 of the Tesla M2070s GPUs, each of which exceeds over 400 cores. Two fully populated C410xs are in turn powered by one PowerEdge C6145 for a combined total of 33 Teraflops in just 7U.
Talk about a lot of power in a little space 🙂
Extra-credit reading
PowerEdge C6145 — Dell DCS unveils its 4th HPC offering in 12 months, and its a beefy one
PowerEdge C410x — Say hello to my little friend — packing up to 16 GPGPUs
NVIDIA: from gaming graphics to High Performance Computing
OpenStack, the open source cloud platform based on code donated by NASA and Rackspace, has gained considerable traction since it was launched eight months ago. The community has rapidly grown and there have been several releases. Now its time to get potential customers trying it out and kicking the tires.
With the idea of removing friction to adoption and make the testing out of the platform as easy as possible, Dell, Equinix and Rackspace are announcing today the availability of a free OpenStack cloud demonstration and test environment.
The idea of the demo environment is to allow organizations to easily evaluate OpenStack and assess application performance on the platform in a low risk environment for free. The next step after a successful demo would be a proof of concept.
Movin workloads around the country
This demo environment is initially available in three U.S. data centers and in Q2 of this year this offering will also be available in Equinix data centers in Europe and Asia. The initial data centers are:
Equinix Silicon Valley
Equinix Asburn, VA
Rackspace Chicago
By having geographically dispersed facilities customers are able to test out the moving of applications and workloads between them.
The various parts
The OpenStack demo environment is made up of the following components
Platform Equinix, a global delivery platform of 92 network neutral data centers in 35 metro markets
Widening the circle
The name of the game here is making the trying out of OpenStack as easy as possible. There are a lot of community members and open source aficionados who are already testing out OpenStack. The idea with OpenStack cloud demonstration environment is to provide a set up where a greater number of organizations feel comfortable evaluating the platform for themselves.
in 2010 there were 75 people in attendance. The purpose of this initial invite-only event was to “develop a roadmap for the first release, spec out the software and spend the last two days prototyping and hacking.”
Posted by Barton George 
Barton's Blog 