A couple of weeks ago, I was on my way to OSCON, one of the largest open source conferences. I know some may ask, "What is Dell doing there?" Despite Dell's long investment in Linux and open source (my team, Linux Engineering, has been around since the 90's), Dell's role in the Linux and open source communities is often little known. I'd like to give a summary of my experience at this year's OSCON, hoping to highlight some of Dell's role in Linux and open source.
Dell's booth at OSCON this year was manned by the dozen Dellites in attendance in addition to one OS partner from Canonical and another from SUSE. We made a few major announcements at OSCON, although my favorite is that Sputnik buyers are now offered three free months on Joyent's cloud. More details of our announcements are at <http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/uscorp1/press-releases/2013-07-23-dell-open-source-cloud-big-data>.
Speaking of Joyent, by far my favorite talk was the talk titled "Open Source Systems Performance" by Brendan Gregg of Joyent. Having a background in both Linux and Solaris myself, I had never given DTrace--a dynamic tracing framework--a try, and I was floored both by Brendan's breadth of knowledge and the power of DTrace at solving the kinds of performance problems that otherwise would be elusive with conventional tools. I also left feeling that the people at Joyent are well-versed at solving hard performance problems and bringing better solutions to customers. I am glad that Joyent is one of Dell's public cloud partners and is contributing to Project Sputnik.
As far as Project Sputnik goes, when I arrived in Portland, my first stop was Dell's booth to setup our XPS 13 Developer Edition laptops. We had two to demo at our booth and were giving away another three that week. Here you can see me caught off-guard by Barton George's camera while I'm helping to set up. :) Dell's come a long way since we shipped our first Ubuntu pre-loaded systems in 2007. Many had thought that we stopped, when the truth is that our commitment to Ubuntu has only grown stronger over the years, though lately most of our shipments have been in Asia. In fact, the factory installer for Ubuntu developed by Dell is now used for all Ubuntu factory installs across OEMs. As a Linux zealot since 1998, I am hoping that Project Sputnik is just the beginning of a revival in Linux offerings here in the States.
Of course, I also dropped by the other end of the expo hall to talk with our friends at Red Hat, with whom we've worked for many years. I also got a chance to talk with the folks at Citrix about XenServer on PowerEdge. And, since I've been exploring the gamut of virtualization tools lately, Solomon Hykes' talk about Docker was informative and intriguing. I had a chance to meet many involved in OpenStack, both to celebrate OpenStack's third birthday and to join Rob Hirschfeld (OpenStack Foundation Board member and fellow Dellite) and others in discussing what's core to OpenStack. I'm still new to OpenStack but hope personally to become more involved.
Roaming the expo hall, one moment of delight was to see one particular startup's booth. A year ago, I had helped a team at Dell who was working with a customer on their all-SSD cloud storage platform. A year later, I was very excited to see some very familiar hardware on their brochures. They now sell a product running on some of my favorite hardware on my favorite OS. :) It's splendid to know that our goal of making Dell's support for Linux the best in the industry--both on client and server systems--pays off in many ways, even if it's often behind the scenes. From our OEM <dell.com/oem> offerings to our conventional PowerEdge and client offerings to our cloud offerings complete with Dell Crowbar <crowbar.github.com>, we work closely with many of the companies that lined the floor of this year's expo hall, whether on helping with bettering the open source tools available to them (linux.dell.com/git is just a sampling) to bug fixes and patches to ensuring that IHV's provide fully open source drivers to selling hardware we fully support on their OS of choice.