On beyond Crowbar: RackN and Digital Rebar

January 11, 2016

Last, but not least in my KubeCon video-palooza series is an interview with RackN founder, Rob Hirschfeld.  Rob talks about their offering Digital Rebar and how it addresses composable operations.

Some of the ground Rob covers

  • How he’s taking what he did at Dell (Crowbar) and taking it beyond physical provisioning and automation.
  • V3 is now called DigitalRebar Composable operations – the company name is RackN
  • Allows you to build up a “ready state” on the infrastructure and then can bring in Ceph or Kubernetes, OpenStack, Mesoshpere…
  • What companies they’re working with and where they seem themselves going – composable operations and addressing the “fidelity gap” – taking the same work from start to scale and addressing the deployment hassles

Extra-credit reading

 

Pau for now..

 

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Posted by Barton George

DevOpsDays: Crowbar, where its been and where its going

April 25, 2012

Earlier this month at DevOpsDays here in Austin the Dell Crowbar crew hosted a session and gave a demo.  If you’re not familiar with it, Crowbar is an open source software framework written at Dell.  I grabbed some time with Crowbar architect Rob Hirschfeld and got him to recap how far we’ve come in its less than a year and where he sees us going over the next year.

Extra-credit reading

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Posted by Barton George

Dell’s Big Data escalator pitch

February 24, 2012

At our sales kickoff in Vegas, Rob Hirschfeld chose a unique vehicle to succinctly convey our Big Data story here at Dell.  Check out the video below to hear one of our chief software architects for our Big Data and OpenStack solutions explain, in less than 90 seconds, what we are up to in the space and the value it brings customers.

Extra credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Open source Crowbar code now available for Hadoop

November 29, 2011

Earlier this month we announced that Dell would be open sourcing the Crowbar “barclamps” for Hadoop.  Well today is the day and the code is now available at our github repo.

Whats a Crowbar barclamp?

If you haven’t heard of project Crowbar it’s a software framework developed at Dell that started out as an installation tool for OpenStack.  As the project grew beyond installation to include monitoring capabilities, network discovery, performance data gathering etc., the developers behind it, Rob Hirschfeld and Greg Althaus, decided to rewrite it to allow modules to plug into the basic Crowbar functionality.  These modules or “barclamps” allow the framework to be used by a variety of projects.  Besides the OpenStack and Hadoop barclamps written by Dell, VMware created a Cloud Foundry barclamp and DreamHost created a Ceph barclamp.

To help you get your bearings

As I mentioned in the opening  paragraph, the code for the Hadoop barclamp is now available.  To help you get started, below are a couple of videos that Rob put together.  The first walks you through how to install Crowbar and the second one explains how to use Crowbar to deploy Hadoop.

Extra-credit reading

Pau for  now…

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Posted by Barton George

Developers: How to get involved with Crowbar for Hadoop

November 8, 2011

In the previous entry I mentioned that we have developed and will be opensourcing “barclamps” (modules that sit on top of Crowbar) for: Cloudera CDH/Enterprise, Zookeeper, Pig, Hbase, Flume and Sqoop.  All these modules will speed and ease the deployment, configuration and operation of Hadoop clusters.

If you would like to get involved, check out this 1 min video from Rob Hirschfeld talking about how:

Look for the code on the Crowbar GitHub repo by the last week of November.

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Dell to opensource software to ease Hadoop install & management

November 8, 2011

It wouldn’t be surprising if you were surprised to learn that Dell is developing software.  To say that this is an area we haven’t been known for in the past would be an understatement.  While we may not pose a direct threat to Microsoft any time soon, we have been coding in a few focused areas.  One of those areas is cloud installation and management and is represented by our project Crowbar.  While Crowbar began life simply as a way to install Openstack on Dell hardware, it has expanded from there.

Today’s news is that we have developed and will be opensourcing “barclamps” (modules that sit on top of crowbar) for: Cloudera CDH/Enterprise, Zookeeper, Pig, Hbase, Flume and Sqoop.  All these modules will speed and ease the deployment, configuration and operation of Hadoop clusters.  But don’t take my word for it.  Take a listen to Crowbar’s architect Rob Hirschfeld as he explains Crowbar and today’s announcement:

Look for the code on Crowbar GitHub repo by the last week of November.  If you want to get involved, learn how.

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Crowbar: Where its been and where its going

October 24, 2011

Rob Hirschfeld, aka “Commander Crowbar,” recently posted a blog entry looking back at how Crowbar came to be, how its grown and where he hopes it will go from here.

What’s a Crowbar?

If you’re not familiar with Crowbar, its an open source software framework that began life as an installation tool to speed installation of OpenStack on Dell hardware.  The project incorporates the Opscode Chef Server tool and was originally created here at Dell by Rob and Greg Althaus.  Just four short months ago at OSCON 2011 the project took a big step forward when, along with the announcement of our OpenStack solution, we announced that we were opensourcing it.

DevOps-ilicous

As Rob points out in his blog, as we were delivering Crowbar as an installer a collective light bulb went off and we realized the role that Chef and tools like it play in a larger movement taking place in many Web shops today: the movement of DevOps.

The DevOps approach to deployment builds up systems in a layered model rather than using packaged images…Crowbar’s use of a DevOps layered deployment model provides flexibility for BOTH modularized and integrated cloud deployments.

On beyond installation and OpenStack

As the team began working more with Crowbar, it occurred to them that its use could be expanded in two ways: it could be used to do more than installation and it could be expanded to work with projects beyond OpenStack.

As for functionality, Crowbar now not only installs and configures but once the initial deployment is complete, Crowbar can be used to maintain, expand, and architect the instance, including BIOS configuration, network discovery, status monitoring, performance data gathering, and alerting.

The first project beyond OpenStack that we used Crowbar on was Hadoop.  In order to expand Crowbar’s usage we created the concept of  “barclamps” which are in essence modules that sit on top of the basic Crowbar functionality.  After we created the Hadoop barclamp, others picked up the charge and VMware created a Cloud Foundry barclamp and DreamHost created a Ceph barclamp.

It takes a community

Crowbar development has recently been moved out into the open.  As Rob explains,

This change was reflected in our work on OpenStack Diablo (+ Keystone and Dashboard) with contributions by Opscode and Rackspace Cloud Builders.  Rather than work internally and push updates at milestones, we are now coding directly from the Crowbar repositories on Github.

So what are you waiting for?  Join our mailing list, download the code or ISO, create a barclamp, make your voice heard.  Who’s next?

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Rob on Hyperscale Cloud Architecture

February 21, 2011

Earlier this month when the Bexar release for OpenStack went live, a meet up was held in Santa Clara.  As a part of the event, a series of lightening talks were given by various OpenStack community members.  One of the speakers was Dell’s very own Rob Hirschfeld, a senior cloud solutions architect, who has been actively involved with the OpenStack project from the get-go.

Here is the short presentation that Rob gave where he talks about some of the key characteristics of a hyperscale environment and how it differs from a traditional enterprise data center.

Some of the topics Rob touches on:

  • “Nested centralized” vs “Flat Edges”
  • Fully redundant vs. cloud non-redundant
  • Fault zones across applications
  • Cloud-ready hardware

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

What’s happening — A Dell / OpenStack Update

September 15, 2010

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.

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

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