Disclaimer: I work for Dell and we make very fine cloud optimized hardware.  This presentation is NOT slanted towards Dell hardware, it simply reflects lessons learned from listening to our customers.  Of course, people buying Dell servers, networking and storage products pays my salary and WE LOVE OUR CLOUD CUSTOMERS!

This presentation OpenStack Hardware Oct 2011 was the outline for our revisiting of the hyperscale white paper from last fall.  I’m in the process of updating this to reflect lessons learned.

Here are some highlights:

1. Fault zones are not as critical as expected – customers are putting in more redundancy instead of striping apps
2. 10 GbE is more popular than expected
3. Logically segmented redundant networking (teamed) is more popular than physical isolate
4. Customers are starting small (AnyScale instead of HyperScale)