If you’re planning on attending the OpenStack Design summit and conference next week in Beantown you’ll have to check us out. I’m bummed that I will be missing the summit for the first time, I have a big internal presentation next week, but the rest of the Dell OpenStack crew will be there in force. Dell is a sponsor at the event and we will have a keynote, speaking sessions and demos.
What have we got in the works?
Besides checking out Crowbar and our Openstack solution which we launched back at OSCON we will have a whisper suite where we will be showing our latest and greatest stuff that is currently in the works. If you’d like to see what we have up our sleeve, email us at OpenStack@Dell.com and we can schedule a time slot for you to come and see for yourself.
Updated: For more details what we’ll be doing at the summit check out Rob’s blog
Earlier this week, I attended the first two days of the OpenStack Design Summit out in Santa Clara, CA. Before I took off I grabbed sometime with Jim Curry, GM of Rackspace Cloud Builders and the leader of Rackpace’s OpenStack efforts.
I got Jim’s thoughts on how the summit was going, how the project was going as well as some breaking news.
Some of the ground Jim covers:
Jim’s areas of responsibility
How this week’s Design summit is different from the first two? (how its grown and changed)
Some of the hot topics at this summit
Breaking news re. the next release, Diablo, milestones and a regular cadence
Note: I had a brain cramp and said Ubuntu follows the Mozilla schedule, I meant GNOME (go figure)
At the last OpenStack design summit, I sat down with Eucalyptus co-founder Graziano Obertelli and got his thoughts on the effort. This morning I bumped into a now clean-shaven Graziano and thought Id get his input on this week’s summit.
Some of the ground Graziano covers:
What Graziano’s goals are for this weeks OpenStack summit
Earlier today the OpenStack Design Summit kicked off here at the Hyatt in Santa Clara. This four day event is bringing together developers, users and business people to discuss OpenStack and design its future.
Among this morning’s attendees was James Staten Forrester Research’s cloud guru. I grabbed James at the first break and got his thoughts on the event’s kick-off and OpenStack in general.
Some of the ground James covers:
Why he chose to attend and what he’s looking for
What he thought of the opening presentations and how something like an OpenStack could alleviate some of the pain of outages like Amazon had last week.
What type of outcomes he would like to see from this weeks summit.
How important are programs like Rackspace’s cloud builder effort.
Yesterday, near the end of day two of the OpenStack design summit, I caught up with Rick Clark, chief architect of the OpenStack platform. I wanted to get Rick’s thought’s on how the four-month old open source cloud computing project and the summit were going.
Here’s what he had to say:
Some of the ground Rick covers:
The goal of the summit as well as the goal of the next two releases.
Another of yesterday’s featured speakers at the OpenStack design summit was Accenture partner, Joe Tobolski. Joe is part of Accenture labs which looks at emerging technologies and he is responsible for assets and architecture as part of Accenture’s global cloud program.
I sat down with Joe in the cafe downstairs and got his thoughts on why OpenStack would be attractive to enterprises as well as how the Accenture team was participating in the summit.
One of the featured speakers during the kick off of the OpenStack design summit yesterday was NASA CTO of IT, Chris Kemp. OpenStack is an open source cloud platform and the compute side of the project is based on code from NASA’s Nebula cloud.
I got some time with Chris and learned about NASA’s involvement in the project:
Some of the ground Chris covers:
Nebula and the cloud computing platform code base
NASA’s huge data needs and what they do with the data
Serendipity: NASA’s cloud engine + Rackspace’s file system engine
How NASA is working with the project: a two-way street
A couple of days ago Bret Piatt, who handles Technical Alliances for OpenStack, came up to Austin to have further discussion with our team’s software engineers around OpenStack. If you’re not familiar with OpenStack, it is an open source cloud platform founded on contributed code from Rackspace and NASA’s Nebula cloud.
The project was kicked off a couple of months ago at an inaugural design summit held here in Austin. The summit drew over 25 companies from around the world, including Dell, to give input on the project and collectively map out the design for the project’s two main efforts, Cloud Compute and Object Storage.
Since the summit, and the project’s subsequent announcement the following week at the OSCON Cloud Summit, the community has been digging in. The first object storage code release will be available this month and the initial compute release, dubbed the “Austin” release, is slated for October 21. Additionally, the second OpenStack Design Summit has been set for November 9-12 in San Antonio, Texas, and is open to the public.
OpenStack visits Dell
During Bret’s visit to Dell he met with a bunch of folks including two of our software architects, Greg Althaus and Rob Hirschfeld. The three talked about how things were going with the project since the summit as well as specific ways in which Dell can contribute to the OpenStack project.
Below you can see where I crashed the three’s whiteboard session and made them tell me what they were doing. I then followed them, camera in hand, down to the lab where Greg and Rob showed Bret the system that we have targeted for running OpenStack.
Some of the topics (L -> R) Bret, Greg and Rob touch on:
Bret: Getting ready for the object storage release in September and compute in October. Looking to get the right hardware spec’d out so that people can start using the solution once its released.
Rob: Learning about how the project is coming together since the design summit. Interested in how the 3 code lines, storage, NASA compute and Rackspace compute, along with the input that was gathered at the Design summit and community input, are coming together.
Greg and Rob take Brett to the lab to show him the C6100 which could be a good candidate for open stack.
Next step, getting OpenStack in the lab and start playing with it.
If you’re planning on attending the OpenStack Design summit and conference next week in Beantown you’ll have to check us out. I’m bummed that I will be missing the summit for the first time, I have a big internal presentation next week, but the rest of the Dell OpenStack crew will be there in force. Dell is a sponsor at the event and we will have a keynote, speaking sessions and demos.
Posted by Barton George 
Barton's Blog 