As we’ve talked about before, a few of us in Dell’s CTO group have recently been working with our friends at Joyent. This effort is a part of the consideration of platforms capable of intelligently deploying workloads to all major infrastructure flavors – bare-metal, virtual machine, and container.
Today’s post on this topic comes to us complements of Glen Campbell — no, not that one, this one:
Glen has recently come from the field to join our merry band in the Office of the CTO. He will be a part of the Open Source Cloud team looking at viable upstream OSS technologies across infrastructure, OS, applications, and operations.
Cloud, allows customers to take advantage of the technologies and scale Joyent leverages in their Public Cloud.
On the Triton Elastic Container Infrastructure (which I’ll call “Triton” from now on) bare-metal workloads are intelligently sequestered via the use of the “Zones” capabilities of SmartOS. Virtual machines are deployed via the leveraged KVM hypervisor in SmartOS, and Docker containers are deployed via the Docker Remote API Implementation for Triton and the use of the Docker or Docker Compose CLIs.
What’s the Dell/Joyent team doing?
As part of interacting with Triton we are working to deploy a Dell application, our Active System Manager (ASM), as a series of connected containers.
The work with Triton will encompass both Administrative and Operative efforts:
Administrative
Investigate user password-based authentication via LDAP/Active Directory
in conjunction with SSH key-based authentication for CLI work
Track/Monitor Triton logging via Elasticsearch
use Joyent’s pre-packaged build of Elastic’s (http://elastic.co) Elasticsearch
Newer Triton node client to see next-gen of “sdc-X” tools
Docker Compose
build a multi-tier Docker application via Docker Compose, deploy on Triton via its Docker Remote API endpoint
Triton Trident…
deploy a 3-tier application composed of:
Zone-controlled bare-metal tier (db – MySQL)
Docker-controlled container tier (app – Tomcat)
VM-based tier (presentation – nginx)
Dell Active System Manager — a work in progress
aligning with Dell’s internal development and product group to establish a container architecture for the application
Stay tuned
Our test environment has been created and the Triton platform has been deployed. Follow-on blog posts will cover basic architecture of the environment and the work to accomplish the Admin and Ops tasks above. Stay tuned!
Extra-credit reading
Instructions: Installing Triton Elastic Container Infrastructure (updated to reflect learnings from setting up Triton in the Dell CTO lab)
Here is our third and final post walking through the setting up of the Joyent Triton platform in the Dell CTO lab. In the first post, Don Walker of the CTO office gave an overview of what we were doing and why. The second laid out the actual components and configuration of the platform.
Today’s video is a walk-through of the installation process where Don shares his experience in setting up the Triton Platform.
When we pick this series up again it will focus on containerizing Dell’s Active System Manager and then loading it on Triton. Not sure how long this work will take so stay tuned!
Some of the ground Don covers:
Before installing Triton, you need networking set up and working. Don double clicks on the network configuration and what we did to make sure it was working.
Step one in installing Triton, is to create a bootable USB key and install the head node. There is a scripted set up which is dead simple. Lays down SmartOS and Triton services
Compute node install is also scripted which contains a lot of the info you entered during the head node configuration. After this you run acceptance tests
Great support from Joyent with a couple of small issues we had
Unacceptable character in pswd. This info was fed back to the devs and is now fixed.
We forgot to disable the SATA port and kept getting error messages. Once we disabled it, it worked.
Continuing from the previous post, here is a more detailed explanation of the Joyent Triton platform we set up in the CTO lab. Triton is Joyent’s elastic container infrastructure that runs on their cloud, a private cloud or both.
The idea behind setting up this instance is, working with Joyent, to learn about the platform. The next step is to work with the Dell Active System Manager (ASM) team to decompose ASM into microservices and then run it on the Triton platform.
Take a listen as Don walks through the actual layout of the instance.
Some of the ground Don covers
Our minimalist set-up featuring two Dell R730 servers (the schematic only shows one for simplicity. An R730 contains two 520s). Don explains how they are configured and how ZFS affects the set up.
The two Dell Force 10 S6000 switches.
A double-click on the networking set up
The roles the compute and head nodes (the head node acts as the admin into the system).
A while back I tweeted how we had begun setting up a mini-instance of Joyent’s Triton in our Dell CTO lab. Triton is Joyent’s elastic container infrastructure that runs on their cloud, a private cloud or both. This cloud platform includes OS and machine virtualization (e.g. Docker with regards to the former and typical VMs under KVM for the latter).
About a week ago we got the platform set up about and I grabbed sometime with Don Walker of Dell’s enterprise CTO office to tell us about it.
In this first of three videos, Don gives an overview of the work Dell is doing with Joyent. He describes what we’ve set up in the lab and talks about where we hope to take it.
Some of the ground Don covers
Don’s focus on Open Source Cloud eg Open Stack, containers, cloud networking and storage solutions
What the enterprise CTO office does
What we’re doing with Joyent: evaluating Triton and the process of taking existing products and put them into microservices and containers.
Looking at Dell’s ASM (Active System Manager) and what it means to refactor for microservices and containers
Overview of what was set up in the lab: a minimalist 2 node instance consisting of head and compute nodes.
While I was in San Francisco back in November, I stopped by Joyent’s headquarters. The main purpose was to talk about the Docker/Triton platform we are setting up in the CTO lab.
While I was there I chatted with Joyent’s Casey Bisson, director of product management. Casey took me through a couple of white board sessions around containers and VMs. This first session talks about how containers and VMs work together, how they’re different and where Joyent’s elastic container infrastructure, Triton, fits.
Some of the ground Casey covers
Linux allows you to build containers on your laptop and push them, as is, to the cloud. For other OS’s you need to use VMs
Containers in the cloud within VMs and the affect on efficiency
Running containers on bare metal, security concerns and how Joyent addresses these concerns
How Triton virtualizes the network into the container
Extra-credit reading
KubeCon: Learning about Joyent and Triton, the elastic container infrastructure – Barton’s blog
Here’s another interview from KubeCon back in November. This one’s a twofer. Joyent’s CEO and CTO, Scott Hammond and Bryan Cantrill respectively, talk about taking their learnings from Solaris zones and applying them to the world of modern apps and containers.
Some of the ground Scott and Bryan cover
Joyent, a software company focused on delivering a container native software infrastructure platform
They had been doing containers for 6 years and when Docker came along they focused on that
How Solaris zones came about, how Joyent picked it up and ran with it, and how it acted as a foundation for today’s containerized world – How they were in the right place at the wrong time
Whats in store for Joyent going forward – supporting the movement to modern app dev and the intersection of containers – taking this new tech and productizing and simplifying them to allow enterprises to roll them out
Today at Dell world, we are rolling out the public beta of the Dell Cloud Marketplace. The marketplace, which is targeted at both sys admins and developers, allows you to set-up, manage, monitor and pay for a variety of cloud services in a self-service model.
The IaaS platforms available at launch are provided by Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Joyent. Cloud services partners include Docker for application development, Pertino for cloud networking and data management provided by Delphix.
Yesterday before the show kicked off I grabbed some time with the marketplace’s chief architect, Campbell McNeill to learn more. Take a listen to what Campbell had to say:
Some of the ground Campbell covers:
What they learned from this summer’s private beta and how they have rearchitected the marketplace accordingly (focusing on control and governance and leveraging the features of the Enstratius acquisition).
A market place catalog where you can get apps running in Docker containers and then run them in the cloud of your choice.
Providing developers with agility while at the same time giving those tasked with security and compliance a governance control plane.
Sign up today and get $500 free credit and give us you thoughts and help us to further refine improve the marketplace.
Extra-credit reading
Dell Cloud Marketplace: Many Clouds, One Dashboard — InformationWeek
Dell launches into cloud brokerage market with Cloud Marketplace — ZDNet
Dell Tests Public Cloud Waters With Beta Marketplace Offering — CRN
As you may be aware Dell has been offering and hosting a public, multi-tentant IaaS cloud offering. After getting that business off the ground and many customer conversations, we’ve come to realize that the greatest way we can provide value for our customers is to focus our investments on more strategic components of the cloud and provide our customers with maximum choice and flexibility.
As a result, rather than building out and supporting our own multi-tenant public cloud, we will partner with companies in order to provide customers access to the cloud(s) of their choice.
Enter Enstratius
A sampling of some of the public clouds Enstratius provides access to.
With our recent acquisition of Enstratius not only are we are able to provide our customers with the ability to manage and govern a multi-cloud environment but we are now able to offer access to over 20 prominent clouds from Amazon to Rackspace, to Google, to AT&T.
A new Partner Program
Beyond the partners that Enstratius provides access to, today we are also kicking off today a partner program to provide access to IaaS through an ecosystem of options. The first three partners we are announcing are: Joyent, Scale Matrix, Zero Lag:
Joyent: An IaaS provider for real-time web and mobile applications. Joyent has out-of-the-box compatibility with Enstratius’ multi-cloud management.
ScaleMatrix: Cloud hosting platform, Services are offered from proprietary world-class data centers, and leverage enterprise hardware, storage and cutting-edge security and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) mitigation services.
ZeroLag: Combines VMware-powered on-demand cloud infrastructure with professional services and custom-designed solutions.
Customers will be able to purchase products from these partners through their Dell sales representatives and you can find out more information at dell.com/cloud-partner-program.
Private Cloud and Project Sputnik
On the Private Cloud front nothing has changed. We are still huge supporters of OpenStack and will continue offering our Open Stack-based private clouds. Additionally we will continue to provide cloud-to-on-premise connectivity via Boomi.
On the Project Sputnik front the cloud launcher that we continue to work on is being designed to provide access to a host of clouds.
Extra-credit reading
Dell to Deliver Public Cloud through Partner Ecosystem – Press Release
During SXSW Michael Cote and I, on behalf of Dell, organized a series of mini meet-ups focusing on developers, tech and social media folks. The second event we held was on Saturday on the top level of Speakeasy. Being Saturday night, this turned out to be the biggest of the three get togethers.
Here is a small sampling of the folks who dropped by (notice the atmospheric lighting, for half of them they were literally lit by candle light):
Last November, Dell announced the Dell Cloud Solution for Web Applications. This turnkey offering is composed of Dell systems and Joyent Software along with a reference architecture all supported by Dell services. This solution enables a private Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment to support the development and testing of languages such as PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby and Java.
This solution is designed for hosters and telcos who are looking to provide public PaaS offerings. An example of this is Uniserve, a Canadian Internet services provider. Uniserve has adopted the Dell Cloud Solution for Web Applications to offer on-demand access to a high-performance Internet application and consumer delivery platform, for customers to develop iPhone apps to commercial storefronts, to hosting and delivering Software-as-a-Service.
Check out the short video above where Dell Data Center Solutions architect Brian Harris provides a high level overview of the Dell Cloud Solution for Web Applications architecture.
Every year at the end of January Dell holds a giant kick-off meeting for our enterprise and public sales forces. The event, which has been held in Las Vegas the last two years, is a four-day happening consisting of keynotes, sessions and a full-scale expo where the sales team can touch and learn first-hand about the latest and greatest in Dell solutions and offerings.
Setting up the DCS Modular Data Center on the expo floor
This year the systems and solutions have been out in the market for a little while and we were able to share actual case studies with the attendees showing how our systems and solutions have been able to solve real customer problems. The big new addition to the DCS line up was our Modular Data Center (MDC) which, until just a few months ago, was reserved only for a very small group of select customers.
Gearing up for day two of both duty at the DCS booth.
As you can tell from the picture above, the MDC took up a big part of our booth. It served to house our PowerEdgeC servers and host a selection of our cloud solutions:
Additionally, to provide a peak at what PowerEdge C systems we have up our sleeve, we had several units in an uber secret whisper suite.
Our overall message at the booth was that although these components can be used individually, if you want to run “the world’s most efficient hyperscale data center” you’ll want to combine these optimized solutions and systems with the MDC into one hyper-efficient, integrated system.
Well received
Now as a member of the DCS team I may be a little biased but I really think we had the coolest booth there 🙂 It was great to hear comments from the sales force such as “this is awesome!” and “why didn’t I know about this?!”
We’ll have to start now to figure how we will top this next year.
Joyent has been a provider of cloud services for the past five years, longer than the term cloud itself has been around. Today at a press conference in San Francisco, Dell announced the availability of the Dell Cloud Solution for Web Applications which offers the software from Joyent as a turnkey platform-as-a-service offering. This private cloud offering is offered on Dell’s specialized cloud servers and is targeted at IT service providers, hosting companies and telcos.
Up and running
One of the first customers to pick up and run with this offering is Uniserve, a Canadian Internet services provider. Uniserve has adopted the Dell Cloud Solution for Web Applications to offer on-demand access to a high-performance Internet application and consumer delivery platform, for customers to develop iPhone apps to commercial storefronts, to hosting and delivering Software-as-a-Service.
Thoughts from the top
Joyent CEO, David Young is featured in the short video above addressing the following questions about the Dell/Joyent solution:
Back in March we announced Dell’s cloud solutions. Today at a press conference in San Francisco we announced their general availability along with some examples of customers who are employing them. (Woohoo!)
What’s the big idea
The idea behind these offerings has been to leverage the experience we in the DCS group have gained over the last several years providing custom systems to some of the world’s largest cloud providers. These new solutions are targeted at organizations the next tier down (the “next 1,000”) from the hyperscale customers we have been working with.
Who’s using these solutions, a couple of examples
Uniserve, a Canadian Internet services provider, has adopted the Dell Cloud Solution for Web Applications to offer on-demand access to a high-performance Internet application and consumer delivery platform, for customers to develop iPhone apps to commercial storefronts, to hosting and delivering Software-as-a-Service.
InsightExpress, a leading provider of digital marketing research solutions, has deployed the Dell Solution for Data Analytics. The solution combines analytic platform software from Aster Data with Dell PowerEdge C servers with joint service and support, enabling InsightExpress to measure the effectiveness of advertising and brand communications for clients to drive high performing marketing campaigns.
How we got here
We started our expansion by creating a line of specialized PowerEdge C servers patterned after the custom systems we have been designing for the “biggest of the big.” What we realized though is that, unlike the biggest players who write their own software, the next 1000 don’t just want servers, they want solutions that also include software and services as well.
The three integrated solutions that are available today are:
Dell Cloud Solution for Web Applications: A turnkey platform-as-a-service offering targeted at IT service providers, hosting companies and telcos. This private cloud offering combines Dell’s specialized cloud servers with fully integrated software from Joyent.
Dell Cloud Solution for Data Analytics: A combination of Dell’s PowerEdge C servers with Aster Data’s nCluster, a massively parallel processing database with an integrated analytics engine.
Dell Cloud Solution for Data Warehousing: PowerEdge C servers and Greenplum Database 4.0 for building enterprise data warehouses and consolidating data marts in massively parallel processing environments.
Last week a couple of us went down to San Antonio to help represent the OpenStack project at Rackspace’s partner summit. While there I met up with the VAR Guy. Mr. Guy got me chatting about Dell’s Data Center Solutions group, where we’ve been and where we’re going. Below is the resulting video he put together featuring myself and San Antonio’s greenery. (See the original article this came from).
Some of topics I tackle:
How Dell’s Data Center Solutions Group is designing servers for high-end cloud computing
How Dell is integrating hardware with software in cloud servers
Coming soon: Dell Cloud Solution for Web Applications/Leveraging Joyent‘s software
Several months ago in the press release that announced our Cloud Solution offerings, there was a particularly cloudy paragraph that talked about Dell’s relationship with Microsoft. The paragraph ended with the sentence: “Dell and Microsoft will collaborate on the Windows Azure platform, with Dell and Microsoft offering services, and Microsoft continuing to invest in Dell hardware for Windows Azure infrastructure.” What the heck did that mean? Well today we can be a bit clearer.
Dell Cloud based on Windows Azure
Earlier this morning at Microsoft’s Worldwide partner conference, the giant of Redmond announced the limited production release of the Windows Azure technology for a select few tech giants. Dell is one of these and will be taking this technology and creating ourselves a Platform as a service (PaaS) cloud. We will in turn use this cloud to deliver both public and private cloud services to customers looking to develop and deliver next generation cloud services based on .Net. This platform will be targeted at enterprise, public, small and medium-sized business customers as well as be used by Dell itself.
But wait, there’s more: Azure in a box
Dell and Microsoft are also working on a Dell-powered Windows Azure platform appliance. (Don’t let the term “appliance” throw you, you can’t register for this and it really represents 100s or 1000s of servers plus storage and networking). Dell will be making this turnkey cloud platform available to enterprises to enable them to set up their own PaaS clouds within their organizations. Dell has a bit of a leg up here since we’ve been working with Microsoft on Azure as the primary infrastructure partner since its launch back in ’08. We’re simply packaging this “winning combination” and providing it in a turnkey package for internal use by enterprises.
A little context: adding to our cloud portfolio
So how does this fit in with some of the other cloud solutions that we have announced? At a high-level, Dell is providing cloud solutions to help customers take either an evolutionary approach that makes their existing applications more efficient or a revolutionary approach with new applications written for cloud scale (we actually believe customers will do both).
We have already been working with Microsoft to offer evolutionary cloud services based on Microsoft’s Hyper V platform. We are now complementing this with a revolutionary Windows Azure appliance. This turnkey PaaS cloud platform will be in addition to the turnkey PaaS cloud platform that we announced with Joyent. Whereas the Joyent-based offering, “the Dell cloud solution for web applications” is targeted at folks developing in Java, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails etc. the Azure appliance will naturally be targeted at the .Net world. BTW we also offer solutions based on VMware Redwood/ Spring, EMC Atmos and BMC among others.
When I was out in the Bay Area for our launch a while back I stopped by Joyent‘s new headquarters (I actually visited them on their very first day in their new digs). I chatted with CTO Jason Hoffman about his background, what Joyent’s all about and what they are doing with Dell. Take a listen:
Some of the topics Jason tackles
What Joyent does (hint: they provide virtual datacenters)
Joyent customers: they range from the top facebook applications, on line media companies, movie, music and tv studios, online retailers…
Your next computer is the data center — which needs operating environment, an open API and a good set of developer tools.
How Jason got to where he is: via a Doctorate in pathology where he was an end consumer of compute. He realized that a lot of the efficiencies that they had developed in his field could be applied to a hosting environment.
Dell as Joyent’s “private cloud arm:” Joyent software running on Dell’s hardware where Dell can come in and set up the entire environment enabling departments within companies to act as service providers within their organizations.
To put it in perspective…
And since we’re talking about Joyent and Dell and Joyent working together I thought I would include this excerpt from a post that Redmonk analyst Stephen O’Grady recently wrote about the private cloud:
At the present time, however, most of that which we call Platform-as-a-Service – the layer currently serving as middleware – is public cloud only. The PaaS fabrics tend to be proprietary and not available for private consumption. Salesforce.com, for example, doesn’t let you replicate Force.com on your servers. Ditto for Google App Engine. Microsoft Azure features may be trickling back into Windows, but you’re not going to be running Azure in your local datacenter. This is why Dell’s distribution of Joyent’s cloud software came as such a surprise to many; you just don’t see these fabrics being made available locally.
Extra-credit reading
Survey Shows More Than Half of Dynamic Language Developers Are Looking To Build Cloud-based Applications in Next Year
Last but not least in our tour of the first flight of servers in Dell’s PowerEdge C line is the C2100. This was filmed last month at our launch right after we closed down our whisper suite. Click below and join solutions architect Rafael Zamora as he leads you through the thrills, chills and spills of this cool new machine.
Spoiler Alert! A few Highlights
This machine is a great high performance data analytics and cloud optimized storage server. It’s perfect for use in conjunction with software from our Cloud ISV partners Joyent, Aster Data, Canonical or Greenplum.
The entire front can be jam-packed with disk drives for mega storage. You can get up to 24TB by loading twelve 3.5inch 2TB drives.
While the C2100 has same system board as the C1100, it comes with twice the real estate in a 2U form factor.
There’s even a platform for two additional drives that you can use for a bunch of different purposes such as separating production and non-production traffic.
If you’re wondering about the funky game show-like setting, I shot this after hours on the day of our launch in the whisper suite. Your guide, as before, is the incomparable Dell Solutions Architect, Rafael Zamora.
A few highlights
The C1100 is a high memory, cluster optimized, compute node
Dont let its slim pizza box looks fool you, upfront you can pack either four 3.5 inch drives or ten 2.5 inch drives.
For high memory optimized compute you can get 18 DIMM sticks for 144GB of RAM.
Comes with your choice of either Intel’s Nehalem or Westmere processors.
Raf also gives a couple of examples of recent customers and how they’ve decide to configure their units.
At last week’s Dell Launch, “Solutions for the Virtual Era,” we unveiled the first three systems in our new PowerEdge C line. These “hyper-scale inspired” systems are based on designs that we have built for our largest scaled-out customers such as Windows Azure, Facebook, Ask.com and Tencent.
The PowerEdge C line is targeted at both Public and Private cloud builders as well as HPC, Web 2.0, gaming and large scaled out web farms. In the video below, Dell solutions architect Rafael Zamora walks us through the PowerEdge C6100, C1100 and C2100.
Upcoming posts
In the days to come I will be posting individual walk-thrus of each of the three systems. I will also be posting interviews I did with executives from our cloud partners Joyent, Aster Data, Greenplum and Eucalyptus (who’s not a partner but provides a key component of our partner Canonical’s Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud).
Today is the big day. The one we’ve been working towards for a long time. As a part of Dell’s quarterly launch “Solutions for the Virtual Era,” we are announcing the introduction of:
Dell Cloud Solution for Web Applications, our first Revolutionary cloud solution. Partnering with enterprise-class cloud pioneer Joyent, we are offering a turnkey private PaaS solution comprised of pre-tested, pre-assembled and fully-supported hardware, software and services — all sold and supported by Dell. This integrated solution is targeted at enterprise app developers who are looking to develop “new world” applications in the cloud to be deployed in the cloud.
The Cloud Partner Program Working with cloud ISVs we will be offering easy-to-buy and deploy cloud solutions and blueprints optimized for and validated on Dell platforms. The first three partners we are announcing are Aster Data (providing web analytics), Canonical (offering an open source Infrastructure-as-a-Service private cloud) and Greenplum (self-service data warehousing). (On the Evolutionary cloud side we will continue to work with VMware and Microsoft and stay tuned for news on what’s happening on the Windows Azure front :).
A new line of hyperscale-inspired PowerEdge C servers including the PowerEdge C1100, C2100 and C6100 targeting HPC, data analytics, gaming and cloud builders. These are based on the designs we have created for the some of the worlds largest internet companies and cloud providers.
A suite of cloud professional services to help customers assess, deploy, design and manage dedicated solutions.
This is just a quick overview of what we are announcing today. Stay tuned for more details and info in the coming days and weeks.
Extra credit reading: Our Cloud solutions press release
Posted by Barton George 
Barton's Blog 