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With storage in the cloud taking a lead role in the adoption of cloud computing, according to a recent TechTarget survey, it’s a good time to take a deep dive into the role of open source and OpenStack in driving the transition. And so tomorrow’s 2012 Virtual Open Storage Summit, led by our friends at [...]

For those of you who missed the OpenStack Summit in San Diego 2 weeks ago, one of the highlights was the Keynote presentation by our friend Reinhardt Quelle, architect of the Cisco Webex OpenStack cloud. In this 25 minute presentation, Reinhardt makes a compelling case, based on real-world experience, for using OpenStack to run a [...]

In one of my previous posts I outlined some considerations when deploying OpenStack and different approaches to distribution of OpenStack services across hardware to provide HA. However, it is not the OpenStack services themselves that drive the value of going to cloud. I mean, even once high-availability of OpenStack services is assured, the instances and [...]

Just back from a pretty intense week at the SRO OpenStack summit in San Diego (capacity: 1200; attended: 1500), and I can report that the hype about the hype is not overhyped. There’s an early feeding frenzy on, as companies at various points in the supply chain jump in with both feet to figure out [...]

After posting my review and impressions of CloudStack, I was contacted by Nimbula to review their cloud orchestration product, Nimbula Director. Like OpenStack and CloudStack, Nimbula Director is an alternative to Amazon Web Services and VMware solutions, since it can be used to build private and public clouds. However, Nebula Director is not open source like OpenStack [...]

Here are the slides from my presentation today at the OpenStack summit. Comments welcome, especially if you saw it live and we didn’t have a chance to discuss it at the conference. I’ve reprised the abstract below. Making money on OpenStack from Mirantis Abstract: Startups and enterprises alike have placed their strategic bets to monetize [...]

What do you use to store your OpenStack volumes? If you’re building an OpenStack cloud, you’ll need that block level storage to give to your instances through an iSCSI session by default. If  you want to have intelligent, flexible, scalable, and reliable physical storage for this purpose, one alternative you might consider is the Isilon IQ [...]

The following is a guest post by Tristan Goode, OpenStack Foundation Board member and CEO of Aptira. I believe a key role of the OpenStack Foundation is to protect the brand that is OpenStack. I also believe that training is of key importance to advancing OpenStack. Recently Rackspace advertised offering “Rackspace Certified Training for OpenStack”. [...]

Recently, SwiftStack published an interesting overview of their approach to multi-regional OpenStack Swift Object Storage clusters. This approach is perfectly aligned with a design we have been working on with Webex for a geographically distributed Swift cluster with a reduced number of replicas (3+1 instead of 3+3, for example). I’d like to go over our [...]

Yesterday GigaOm’s Barb Darrow intrigued the cloud community with her 8 questions about OpenStack as the next summit approaches. As always, I have the answers to all of them. 1. What’s IBM’s play?  They are a big company and it takes them a long time to do anything. They haven’t figured out their OpenStack play [...]