Last week a major set of milestones was reached for the EMC Federation’s involvement with OpenStack. First, EMC and it’s affiliated companies and brands (VMware, VCE, Pivotal, RSA, Cloudscaling) determined a cohesive strategy for engagement with the OpenStack Foundation Board. Second, EMC appointed a VMware employee, Sean Roberts (@sarob), as...

If you’re following the buzz surrounding the EMC acquisition of Cloudscaling, you might wonder: Is this a mismatch, or am I missing something? Yes. You’re missing something. Let me explain. First, you’ll want to take a closer look at the announcements by EMC today [1]. We will join the EMC Emerging...

As you no doubt heard this week, Rackspace has announced the intention to focus on managed cloud.  Inevitably this brought observations from many about RAX, and others, ability to compete effectively against the web scale public cloud giants: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. One of the commenters was Mike Kavis (twitter link),...

The Cloudscaling team has, once again, submitted an outstanding array of talks and we would all appreciate if you took the time to vote for our presentation submissions. We’ve taken the time to summarize our presentations for you below, as well as provide you with an easy link to cast...

In part 1 and part 2 of this series I introduced the core ideas around defining the requirements and then discussed the first four.  Today we’ll discuss the final two requirements and tie it all together. Onwards and upwards! Requirement #5 – Scalable, Elastic, and Performant Enterprise-grade has to mean...

In part 1 of this series earlier this week, I introduced The 6 Requirements of Enterprise-grade OpenStack.  Today, I’m going to dig into the next two major requirements: Open Architectures and Hybrid Cloud Interoperability. Let’s get started. Requirement #3 – Open Architectures & Reducing Vendor Lock-in We already covered building...

Introduction OpenStack is an amazing foundation for building an enterprise-grade private cloud. The great OpenStack promise is to be the cloud operating system kernel of a new generation. Unfortunately, OpenStack is not a complete cloud operating system, and while it might become one over time, it’s probably best to look...

This week, Google hosted its Cloud Platform Live event. Some people were a little surprised at my enthusiastic live twitter coverage for a number of Google’s announcements. I have been waiting for them to “go big or go home” for a while now. My biggest surprise was how long it...

Last night I presented at the Chicago DevOps Meetup along with @mattokeefe and @mfdii.  The presentation went very well and was warmly received.  It’s a bit of a revisit of some topics I have covered before, such as Pets vs. Cattle, the new kind of elastic cloud, and the architectural...

Fall of last year I wrote a controversial whitepaper detailing my concerns about how distributed storage was being marketed.  The blog introduction and the whitepaper were both entitled Converged Storage, Wishful Thinking, and Reality.  There was a certain amount of expected blowback from folks at RedHat and Ceph as well...