Leveraging data sets can help you make sharper empirically backed decisions. But first, Data driven companies will need to setup cost-effective proven architectures to get an edge.

My team in Dell Enterprise Solutions has been working on an end-to-end business intelligence solution that shows customers how they can pull in patent data from the US Patent office as an example of the power of business intelligence. During the project we used the data to answer questions like: where are the most patents awarded, who are the top companies, what is the time for patents to be awarded.

Using Dell Boomi our team extracted the patent data which was then stored in a Dell Quickstart Data Warehouse Appliance. Using the Dell Toad Business Intelligence Suite we analyzed the data and found the answers to the above questions.

The details of our project can be found in a series of Dell TechCenter wiki episodes here: The Dell Business Intelligence Project Using USPTO Data. This information will also be presented at a breakout session at the Dell Enterprise Forum in San Jose for those of you attending the conference.

Dell: Can you give us a little information about yourself?
John Griffith: My name is John Griffith. I'm currently the technical lead for the block storage project in OpenStack, Cinder.

Q: You're with SolidFire as well?
A: I work for SolidFire. I'm a software engineer and I'm employed full time by SolidFire to contribute to OpenStack.

Q:Imagine the users don't know what Cinder is and give us an overall view of it means to be the project lead. What's that role about?
A: To start with Cinder: It’s block storage service inside of OpenStack. The idea is to provision higher performance storage for volumes for example but also for something persistent such as secondary storage attached to your instances. As far as being a Project Technical Lead, it’s about working with different groups, trying to coalesce different ideas that are out there and trying to make sure that we meet schedules and demands.

Q: When it comes to Cinder, do you have an idea of how many different developers and companies are working on that particular piece?
A: This past cycle has been really interesting in that perspective. We've had 10 new drivers to the Cinder project for backends, which points to about 10 different companies just in the storage space alone.On top of that, we also have a number of service providers that are involved. And as far as regular active involvement on almost a daily basis is concerned, there's at least five companies that are there.

Q: I know that you were listed as one of the hot start-ups in Boulder. Tell us a little bit about the company.
A: At SolidFire, we actually built an all-SSD clustered storage appliance designed specifically to meet the demands of block storage in the cloud. Performance is of course a big thing … as well as IOPs based QoS, we give customers such as service providers the ability to deliver SLAs based on QoS. We're all about changing what you can do in the cloud in terms of block storage.

Q: Thanks John.
A: Thank you.

Resources
John’s Launchpad and Github profile

Dell is launching the Dell Cloud Partner Program to deliver public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) through an ecosystem of partners. more

DevOps

• Jedi.be: “Infrastructure as Code - A comprehensive overview” by Patrick Debois
• Rackspace: “Cloud Databases vs. MySQL on Cloud Servers”

OpenStack

• Dell: “OpenStack Board of Directors Talks: Episode 10 with Joseph George, Director of Product Strategy of Dell’s Revolutionary Solutions Team”
• Dell: “Dell to Deliver Public Cloud through Partner Ecosystem”
• Dell: “Dell to go Partner route for public cloud” by Barton George - Personal Blog
• Dell: “Interview with Anne Gentle, OpenStack Technical Writer”
• Dell: “Interview with John Griffith at SolidFire”
• Dell: “Dell Cloud News: Hyper-V for OpenStack, Public Cloud Partner Program” by Joseph George - Personal Blog
• Dell: “Connecting the dots: Dell stays course on OpenStack private” by Rob Hirschfeld
• Mirantis: “OpenStack Project Technical Lead Interview Series #2: Monty Taylor, OpenStack CI(Continuous Integration) Project”
• OpenStack Foundation: “Dates For The OpenStack Hong Kong Summit Announced!”
• Opscode: “Open The Bifrost!”
• Piston: “What is OpenStack?”
• Piston: “VMware Cloud Faces Competition from OpenStack, Microsoft Azure”
• Piston: “The International Character of OpenStack”
• Simplicity Scales: “Stacker Voices: Mark McLoughlin, Red Hat”

Hadoop

• Cloudera: “Meet the Project Founder: Roman Shaposhnik”
• Cloudera: “FAQ: Understanding the Parcel Binary Distribution Format”
• Cloudera: “HBaseCon 2013: "Operations" Track Preview”
• Datameer: “How Sears is Using Datameer + Hadoop”

Contributors

Please find detailed information on all contributors in our Wiki section.

Contact

If you have any feedback, suggestions, ideas, or if you’d like to contribute - I’ll be happy to hear back from you.

Twitter: @RafaelKnuth

Email: rafael_knuth@dellteam.com

Hi Community, here is my compilation of the most interesting technical blog posts written by members of the Microsoft MVP Community. The number of MVPs is growing well, I hope you enjoy their posts. @all MVPs If you’d like me to add your blog posts to my weekly compilation, please send me an email (flo@datacenter-flo.de) or reach out to me via Twitter (@FloKlaffenbach). Thanks! 

Featured Posts of the Week!

Videointerview mit Mark Minasi über “Why should Admins learn PowerShell” by Carsten Rachfahl

Hyper-V Host Patching – Cluster Aware Updading vs. Virtual Machine Manager Fabric Patching by Thomas Maurer

Create an SP2013 VM on Azure using PowerShell by Thorsten Hans

Questions regarding Networking in VMM 2012 SP1 by Kristian Nese

Azure

Overview of Microsoft #WindowsAzure #Powershell for automated #Cloud Services by James van den Berg

Hyper-V

Capacity Planner for Hyper-V Replica by Thomas Maurer

Hyper-V Host Patching – Cluster Aware Updading vs. Virtual Machine Manager Fabric Patching by Thomas Maurer

Port Mirroring on Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V by Lai Yoong Seng

Unable to Add VHDX to Hyper-V Virtual Machine in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V by Lai Yoong Seng

Office 365

Use Project Server Online in #Office365 to manage your Projects Successfully with #Cloud Services by James van den Berg

PowerShell

Converting to size units (KB, MB,GB,TB, and PB) without using PowerShell multipliers by Ravikanth Chaganti

Friday Fun: View Objects in a PowerShell GridList by Jeffery Hicks

Videointerview mit Mark Minasi über “Why should Admins learn PowerShell” by Carsten Rachfahl

Sharepoint 

Create an SP2013 VM on Azure using PowerShell by Thorsten Hans

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1: Requirements by Aidan Finn

Questions regarding Networking in VMM 2012 SP1 by Kristian Nese

Windows Server Core

New networking features in Windows Server 2012 by Marcelo Sinic

Fixing Event ID 2002 “The policy and configuration settings could not be imported to the RD Gateway server “%1″ because they are associated with local computer groups on another RD Gateway server” by Didier van Hoye

RD Gateway Messaging Tab Windows Server 2008 R2 & 2012 by Didier van Hoye

Microsoft Cloud OS: An Overview by Aidan Finn

Das Active-Directory-Schema analysieren in German by Nils Kaczenski

Berechtigungen in Active Directory dokumentieren in German by Nils Kaczenski

#PSTip Retrieve group membership of an Active Directory group recursively by Shay Levy

Last February, Principled Technologies compared Dell EqualLogic hybrid arrays with the industry-leading SAN storage solution for VDI. Results are here for you to review.

Following up the first study, Principled Technologies has now completed a study comparing Dell EqualLogic solution with the industry-leading NAS storage solution in the industry for a realistic desktop virtualization customer scenario.

They considered an IT organization that is deploying virtual desktops for 800 task workers. The organization had requirements of 10GB of storage capacity per user and throughput capacity of seven to eight IOPS per desktop.

Principled Technologies developed a solution for these requirements with VMware View using a Dell EqualLogic PS6110XS hybrid array for one configuration and the industry-leading NAS storage solution for another configuration. All other elements of the two configurations were identical.

To make an equitable comparison, the industry-leading NAS storage solution contained similar number of SSDs and HDDs, as well as software-based caching solution that leverages SSDs for “hot” data placement similar to EqualLogic automatic data tiering.

Principled Technologies tested both configurations using Login VSI software that measured end-user performance in all desktops. They also compared cost, system performance, power consumption, ease of deployment and operational management efficiency for both the solutions in this scenario.

For an 800-desktop VDI environment, Principled Technologies found the following:

• The Dell EqualLogic PS6110XS-based solution cost $102 per desktop; the competing industry-leading, similarly-configured NAS cost $210 per desktop; therefore, customers receive 51% savings with EqualLogic over the competition.
• Both EqualLogic PS6110XS and the competing solution performed similarly, as demonstrated by the Login VSI software and other system performance metrics.
• The Dell EqualLogic PS6110XS solution consumed 68% less power.
• The Dell EqualLogic iSCSI SAN storage array was very simple to setup and monitor.

Principled Technologies concluded that the Dell EqualLogic PS6110XS hybrid iSCSI SAN array is the better VDI storage solution than the industry-leading NAS storage solution as it costs 51% less, performs similar to the other solution while consuming 68% less power, and is easier to deploy and manage.

Check out the report for all the details.

In our ongoing series of interviews with the Dell TechCenter Rockstars, we aim to contribute to the Enterprise IT community by shining a light on the  IT pros that participate in online conversations.

Recently, we interviewed Pete Koehler, who was inducted into both the Dell TechCenter Rockstars program and the VMware vExpert program in 2013.  

Pete has almost 2 decades of experience in the IT industry and he currently lives in Bellevue, Washington where he works as an IT manager and blogs regularly on vmpete.com.

Pete Koehler

Please tell us about yourself. What is your current role and where do you work?

I'm currently the IT Manager at Tecplot, Inc.  Based in Bellevue, Washington, Tecplot is a software company that provides data visualization solutions for engineers and scientists.  My responsibilities cover a broad spectrum, but I try to stay focused on big picture architectural matters with regards to virtualization, networking, and shared storage.  I also am involved in helping teams have better solutions to improve their workflows, as well as helping our senior management team understand trends in technology that they should know about.

What is your IT blog about, and how did you get started?

I like to focus on posts that help others put the technical pieces of the puzzle together.  I enjoy providing information as seen from the trenches.  I am totally incapable of writing a short blog post, since I try to fill in the gaps that deployment guides or other articles may not address.  The blog started on a whim back in 2008 when we began virtualizing our infrastructure.  I thought I might run out of things to write about.  I don't worry about that anymore.

How did you get involved in the IT industry?  Do you specialize in any particular IT technology?

I started out my career as a Drafter for an engineering firm in the early 90's.  The IT Administrator noticed right away that I was automating CAD systems, and fixing everything plugged in.  It was a great way to get my feet wet.  While I'm passionate about Virtualization, storage, and networking that serve up modern data center architectures, I'm also proud to call myself a generalist.  It allows for a great blend of strategic versus tactical thinking.  Businesses don't care about packets and protocols.  They want solutions that serve their needs.  It's easy to get lost in the weeds and forget about that part, especially when diving deep into the latest technical matter..

What are the biggest IT challenges that you face?  

A perennial focus is for our IT department to be able to deliver great business value to Tecplot, while maintaining CAPEX and OPEX costs.  Lately, my focus has been to simplify our infrastructure.  In the software development world, there is commonly used metaphor known as "technical debt"   This often refers to code or software architectures that have a compounding penalty against future endeavors or corrections.  IT infrastructures and solutions can suffer from this same ailment as well.  Stephen Covey once said that "organizations are perfectly aligned to get the results that they get."  It is a statement that is incredibly appropriate for IT organizations.  Spend your days putting out fires with no time to advance forward, or take a step back and challenge your own assumptions on what the real problems are, or what the end result should be.  The era of rethinking the delivery of solutions is here.  Thanks to modern technologies, organizations large and small can and do use the very same tools.  Its all about the execution.

Do you find Dell TechCenter helpful in your role? 

Yes I do.  Tecplot uses a lot of solutions in the Dell portfolio, including Dell blades and rack mounted servers, PowerConnect switches, and EqualLogic arrays.  TechCenter has been a great resource.  Over the years, having the opportunity to get to know some of the contributors online and in person through the Dell Enterprise Forums, has also helped establish a connection between an end user like myself, and those who want to help.  Listening to customer feedback is something that Dell TechCenter does extremely well.  Coming from a software company, I know how important this is.

What would you like to see on Dell TechCenter in the future? 

I would love to see more brand awareness so that the day-to-day enterprise user knows exactly what the Dell TechCenter can do for them.  Great content is king.  Couple that with making it  THE single location that a customer can go to in order to learn how to deploy  any solution under the Dell portfolio, regardless of what product it is.  I think that would be a great definition for success.

You can find Pete Koehler online at:

@vmpete on Twitter

http://vmpete.com/ 

To see more posts from Pete relating to Dell, read the following posts:

Vroom! Scaling up Virtual Machines in vSphere to meet performance requirements

Vroom!  Scaling up Virtual Machines in vSphere to meet performance requirements - part 2

Post:  "Configuring a VM for SNMP monitoring using Cacti

The latest release of Dell OpenManage Client Intrumentation 8.2 is available today

The Dell OpenManage Client Instrumentation (OMCI) enables remote management application programs to access the client's system information, monitor the status, or change the state like shutting it down remotely. Through standard interfaces, OMCI exposes key system parameters, allowing administrators to manage inventory, monitor system health, and gather information on  deployed Dell client systems like Latitude, Precision Mobile, Optiplex and Precision Workstation.

New features and enhancements in OMCI 8.2 include:

• Added Support for the following new BIOS options:

• • Advanced Battery Charge Configuration
  • Peak Shift Configuration
  • Peak Shift Battery Threshold
  • Intel Rapid Start Technology(IRST) Timer
  • OROM Keyboard Access 
  • Optional Boot Sequence
  • On Screen Buttons
  • Dock display port 1 Video source
  • Wireless Gigabit (WiGig) radio control switch
  • Memory mapped I/O above 4 GB
  • Switchable Graphics
  • UEFI Network Stack
  • LAN with PXE boot option in wakeonlan

•  Support for Advanced System Management (ASM) for: 

• • Setting the for Non Critical Threshold Levels non-critical threshold values for voltage, current, and temperature probes.
  • Displaying the characteristics of power supply, voltage, current, temperature, and cooling device probes.  
  • Blinking the LED of the Power Supply Units.

• Support for Alerts for Intel based RAID Controller

I just came back from the OpenStack Day CEE (Central and Eastern Europe) in Budapest (Hungary) and all I can say is: the event was an incredible success. Although it was the first OpenStack gathering targeted at the CEE region, almost 250 people from 10 countries joined. My (subjective) key takeaways:

• CERN (with datecenters in Switzerland and Hungary) is leading the game as the largest and most advanced OpenStack user in the region. Their ambitious plan for OpenStack is to ramp 15,000 hypervisors with 100,000 virtual machines by 2015.
   
• There are opportunities to do business in that region (read: provide trainings, deploy OpenStack etc.) and most companies and organizations I spoke with are at a very early stage of contemplating to utilize OpenStack.
   
• Most impressive to me was see how boldly CEE based companies seize opportunities globally: such as CloudBase Solutions – headquatered in Italy and with branches in Romania, helping companies to integrate their Microsoft environments with OpenStack. Most of their customers are based in the US and in Asia. It's a good example that country borders do not matter anymore, as well as the size and localization of the country you run your business from.
   
• Key OpenStack backers such as Red Hat, Canonical, VMware definitely have the CEE region on their radar and they are super supportive. If you are contemplating to start an OpenStack User Group for example, they will surely support you with resources and contacts (by the way: running an OpenStack User Group is the best way to join forces with other OpenStackers, grow your local community and rock the world).

You can view the recorded sessions here– you can find both high level presentations of OpenStack as well as technical deep dives into OpenStack deployment, management, storage and networking. Also, if you are interested in an OpenStack Bootcamp: register for a 3 day course in Lubljana, Slovenia (11^th– 13^th June 2013).

I will do interviews with Márton Kiss and Gergely Szalay shortly who organized the OpenStack Day CEE. Watch out for those interviews at Dell TechCenter. In the meantime, please find below some short interviews I did during the event:

Tim Bell, CERN

[to be published soon]

Alessandro Pilotti, CloudBase Solutions

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Nicolas Thomas, Canonical

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Nikola Dipanov, Red Hat

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Bruce Davie, VMware

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Yves Fauser, VMware

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Please join our second Lunchtime Live Demo June 4^th at 1.00 – 1.45 pm EDT (UTC-4 hrs). With that series, we want to introduce you to innovative (startup) companies that provide exciting solutions for the cloud (consider this a community service for the broader cloud community). Expect no marketing talk – just  a quick glance under the hood and an opportunity to chat with those guys who built the product.

If you are not able to attend, watch out for the wrap up blog post which we will publish a few days after the demo. Also, if you have any questions prior to the chat or suggestions, feel free to reach out to me via email (see below). We love to iterate and get better with every iteration!

About Zadara Storage

Zadara Storage provides a Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA™) - an iSCSI/NFS storage array in the Cloud, connected to a customer's Cloud servers. Each VPSA has dual controllers (HA), dedicated drives and offers free choice of SSD, SAS or SATA drives. The VPSA can be managed in the same way as a SAN or NAS array in a datacenter.

Agenda

• Introduction to Zadara Storage (10 min)
• Live Demo (20 min)
  • Creation of VPSA
  • Create RAID, VOL, and assign to servers
  • Show growth on the fly
  • Monitoring
  • All on MS Server
  • Q&A (15 min)

Our Presenters

Doug Jury, VP Cloud Sales at Zadara Storage

Vladimir Popovski, VP Cloud Operations at Zadara Storage

In order to attend the chat, go to delltechcenter.adobeconnect.com/chat No registration is required. If you have any questions prior to the chat, please contact rafael_knuth@dellteam.com. Looking forward to see you there!

I had a chance to speak with Hendrik Volkmer during DevOps Days in Berlin last week. Hendrik works as an IT consultant with Cloudbau, and he recently wrote a great blog post series:

There will be no reliable cloud (part 3)
How I stopped worrying and love the cloud

There will be no reliable cloud (part 2)
Complexity and scale lead to a system design that can only be unreliable at the infrastructure layer

There will be no reliable cloud (part 1)
Stop wasting your time trying to find one. Stop wasting your time (and money) trying to build one.

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Enjoy!

Hi Community, here is my compilation of the most interesting technical blog posts written by members of the Microsoft MVP Community. The number of MVPs is growing well, I hope you enjoy their posts. @all MVPs If you’d like me to add your blog posts to my weekly compilation, please send me an email (florian_klaffenbach@dell.com) or reach out to me via Twitter (@FloKlaffenbach). Thanks!

Featured Posts of the Week!

Exchange 2010 SP3 Rollup 1 released by Johan Veldhuis

Validating Hyper-V 2012 and Failover Clustering Hotfixes and Cumulative Updates by Hans Vredevoort

#Microsoft Lync Server 2013 Networking Guide #Lync #Office365 by James van den Berg

Windows Server 2012 Cluster Aware Updating In Action by Didier van Hoye

Exchange

Exchange 2010 SP3 Rollup 1 released by Johan Veldhuis

Hyper-V

Validating Hyper-V 2012 and Failover Clustering Hotfixes and Cumulative Updates by Hans Vredevoort

Videointerview mit Aidan Finn über das Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Installation and Configuration Guide Buch by Carsten Rachfahl

Lync Server

#Microsoft Lync Server 2013 Networking Guide #Lync #Office365 by James van den Berg

PowerShell

Converting to size units – our solution and the winner by Shay Levy

Powershell – Output “formatieren” und Details anzeigen in German by Robert Mühsig

Sharepoint 

#PSTip Getting SharePoint 2010 Health Analyzer alerts report by email by Shay Levy

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

Tuning and Optimization Virtualization Infrastructure With VMM 2012 SP1 Extension by Lai Yoong Seng

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1: Components by Aidan Finn

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1: Software Requirements by Aidan Finn

Technical Documentation Download for System Center 2012 – Virtual Machine Manager #SCVMM #Powershell #Hypervby James van den Berg

SQL Server

#PSTip Retrieving SQL database last backup dates using SMO by Ravikanth Chaganti

Windows Client

Hoe goed is #Windows7 #facts #microsoft #apple by Robert Smit

Windows Server Core

Windows Server 2012 Cluster Aware Updating In Action by Didier van Hoye

Whitepaper: Datensicherung virtueller AD-Domänencontroller in German by Nils Kaczenski

VMware vCenter: AD-Login-Probleme gelöst in German by Nils Kaczenski

PowerShell-Dokufehler für New-IscsiServerTarget in German by Nils Kaczenski

-authored by Shrinidhi Katte

The latest release of Dell Client Configuration ToolKit 2.2 released on 31-May-2013.

Dell Client Configuration ToolKit (CCTK) is a packaged software offering that provides configuration capability to Dell client systems such as OptiPlex, Latitude, and Dell Precision workstation. You can configure the client systems using a Graphical User Interface (GUI) or a Command Line Interface (CLI). You can use CCTK in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) environments and Microsoft Windows Pre-installation Environment (Windows PE), Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8 operating systems.

The features added in this release include the below:

• Support for the following BIOS options:
  • Advanced Battery Charge Configuration
  • Peak Shift Configuration
  • Peak Shift Battery Threshold
  • Intel Rapid Start Technology(IRST) Timer
  • OROM Keyboard Access
  • Optional Boot Sequence
  • On Screen Buttons
  • Dock display port 1 Video source
  • Wireless Gigabit (WiGig) radio control switch
  • Memory mapped I/O above 4 GB
  • Switchable Graphics
  • Block S3 Sleep state
  • UEFI Network Stack
  • LAN with PXE boot option in wakeonlan

• Support for Advanced System Management (ASM) for:
  • Setting the non-critical threshold values for voltage, current, and temperature probes.
  • Displaying the characteristics of power supply, voltage, current, temperature, and cooling device probes.   
  • Blinking the LED of the Power Supply Units

• Support for the following only in CLI:
• HDD related

• • Displaying the hard disk drive (HDD) details
  • Feature to set and clear of HDD passwords

Download for CCTK 2.2 is available links mentioned below,

• Windows download
• Red Hat Linux download

The associated documents and manuals can be obtained in this link.

We appreciate any feedback from customers on our tool. Please drop in any of your feedback, questions, requests and ideas in Tech Center Forum to help us help you.

We will host our Meetup in Szczecin (Poland) and we are expecting attendees from 9 different countries to join us online via Google Hangout and IRC Chat.

DELL: Can you please introduce yourself?
A:  I'm Ross Turk from Inktank and I'm Vice President of Community. My job is to make sure that the Ceph project is healthy and Inktank has a strong business. As you know, Inktank is the principle sponsor of the Ceph project and our responsibility is to market it, fund it and make sure that it's a strong project.

Q: Could you give us a brief introduction to Inktank and open storage project Ceph?
A:  Ceph is an open source distributed storage platform. It is the perfect storage solution for OpenStack. Ceph has object storage and bloc storage capabilities that, though their self-managing and self-healing properties, allow you to get very cost-effective storage using just a very simple software layer on top of everyday hardware.

Q: Why should people use Ceph instead of the default capabilities that come with OpenStack for block storage?
A: Default capabilities of OpenStack for block storage is Cinder, which is in a way an abstraction layer. Beneath Cinder, Ceph is one of the options for block storage. The reason to use Ceph is because it has a really good scalability profile. It's easy to manage and it's the lowest cost per gigabyte that you can get in the market today.

Q: What are the ideal use cases for Ceph?
A: Cloud is definitely one of the ideal use cases, because it’s about massive scale, where cost is very important. Ceph provides the ability to manage a cluster by itself, and that is really important. Ceph is built for very large scale uses. Cloud is definitely one use case, HPC is definitely another as well as large scale backup archives. But we're really doubling down on Cloud because it's obvious that the trend lines up with Ceph strengths.

Q: Thank you very much.
A: Thank you.

Resources

• Inktank at Twitter: @Inktank
• Ross Turk at Twitter: @RossTurk
• Ross Turk’s Personal website
• Ceph at Twitter: @Ceph
• Ceph at Github
• Ceph Webpage
• Lecture on Ceph at OSCON 2012

Dell: Can you tell us something about your company and about yourself a little bit?
Bernard Golden: I’m Bernard Golden and I work for Enstratius - a cloud management software company. We provide a software product used by organizations to manage clouds - hybrid clouds, multiple clouds, heterogeneous environments. We give users a consistent management framework with common access controls across all of these cloud environments. Our customers want to be able to integrate with corporate management systems and we support that. We also support tracking, scalability and elasticity across all environments.

Q: Enstratius supports OpenStack and other clouds so I can have multiple clouds under the same management tool. Is that correct?
A: Yes, it’s a very common scenario for our customers, especially large enterprises, with several different cloud environments on-premise plus one or more public cloud environments like Amazon, Terremark, Savvis or OpenStack.

Q: OpenStack has a management tool - Horizon. Would you look as a replacement for Horizon or does it link into it?
A: Well, typically we would sit to the side of it because people still need to manage the cloud infrastructure, the orchestration layer. We don't do that. We don't replace Horizon. It’s a different sort of functionality. You might think of us being a layer up from what Horizon does.

Q: Bernard, thanks again for taking the time and we appreciate seeing you again here at this event. Thanks.
A: Well, thanks so much for inviting me.

Resources

Bernard’s Twitter handle and bio at Enstratius website.

TechEd 2013: Dell PowerEdge VRTX Shared Infrastructure Platform- How to Assign Shared Storage

This blog post was originally written by Michael Schroeder. Send your suggestions or comments to WinServerBlogs@dell.com.

This week at Microsoft TechEd 2013 in New Orleans we’ve announced the PowerEdge VRTX platform. It contains servers, storage, networking and management integrated together in a single compact chassis. One of the top customer questions we’ve received at our booth has been around storage configuration on VRTX. Here’s a short video to show you how easy it is to assign shared storage on the PowerEdge VRTX chassis. If you’re at TechEd please stop by our booth and ask for a VRTX demo.

(Please visit the site to view this video)

This blog post was originally written by Michael Schroeder. Send your suggestions or comments to WinServerBlogs@dell.com.

This week at Microsoft TechEd 2013 in New Orleans we’ve announced the PowerEdge VRTX platform. It contains servers, storage, networking and management integrated together in a single compact chassis. One feature that’s unique to VRTX when compared to other platforms is the ability to assign PCIe slots in the chassis to individual servers. This gives you a great deal of flexibility for your desired configuration. Here’s a quick video to show you how easy it is to assign these PCIe cards within the VRTX chassis.

(Please visit the site to view this video)

This blog post was originally written by Michael Schroeder. Send your suggestions or comments to WinServerBlogs@dell.com.

This week at Microsoft TechEd 2013 in New Orleans we’ve announced the PowerEdge VRTX platform. It contains servers, storage, networking and management integrated together in a single compact chassis. One of the top customer questions we’ve received at the Dell booth has been around configuring storage on VRTX. Here’s a short video to show you how easy it is to create virtual disks on the internal drives within the VRTX chassis.

(Please visit the site to view this video)

I gave a presentation at LinuxCon Japan last week. This is the 4^th annual event in Japan. “LinuxCon Japan is the premiere Linux conference in Asia that brings together a unique blend of core developers, administrators, users, community managers and industry experts.” Linux Foundation web site.

http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-japan/program/about

I attended this conference 4 times in row as a speaker. This year I presented about Crowbar especially version2 update. The presentation material is stored here.

http://www.slideshare.net/osonoi/crowbar2-update

The agenda is

-Crowbar Overview include other OSS project related to Crowbar

Since Crowbar is working with Chef and using DevOps model, so I covered these related topics.

-Crowbar 2 update

Updated architecture and detailed update such as abstraction layer and capability of using Chef, Puppet. And upstreaming, autoyast, DB, pull-from-source, Rails 3…

-Dell TechCenter

Now we are working on collecting many info on Dell TechCenter Japan. So please stay tuned at Dell TechCenter

Crowbar info at Dell TechCenter http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/cloud/w/wiki/3277.dell-crowbar-open-source-cloud-installer.aspx

Dell: Noam, can you go ahead and tell us about Zadara Storage?
Noam Shendar: Zadara Storage was the very first storage company to join OpenStack back in 2011. We've been closely involved ever since. Our storage is actually based on OpenStack with OpenStack Nova inside our product. We are using Nova to create enterprise storage for service providers, to allow them to sell high-end storage services to their customers - storage that looks and behaves like enterprise storage, but has all the beneficial attributes of cloud storage: flexibility, elasticity and of course low price. We provide the storage elements supporting both traditional and new applications, which means very high levels of quality of service, like high performance, high reliability and again, the flexibility and elasticity that everybody expects from cloud storage.

Q:  What is unique about your solution compared to other storage solutions?
A:  There are a few things that are unique. First of all, we're 100 percent software based.  Just like the OpenStack solutions, we run software on top of standard x86 servers.  Another thing that's unique about us is that we scale very, very large.  Because we're OpenStack based, just like OpenStack we can scale to thousands and thousands of nodes. The last piece is: We built this specifically for service providers. There is billing, metering, inventory management, operations ... all of those things are built into the product, not just hooks, but the actual functionality, therefore service providers can start selling the product from day one without having to create or integrate new functionality.

Q:  Thank you Noam.
A: Thank you.

Resources

• Zadara Storage
• Zadara Storage on Twitter
• Zadara Storage in the Demo Theater
• What is Zadara Cloud Block Storage