Category Archives: Mike Pittaro

Do Be Dense! Dell C8000 unit merges best of bladed and rackable servers

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“Double wide” is not a term I’ve commonly applied to servers, but that’s one of the cool things about this new class of servers that Dell, my employer, started shipping today.

My team has been itching for the chance to start cloud and big data reference architectures using this super dense and flexible chassis. You’ll see it included in our next Apache Hadoop release and we’ve already got customers who are making it the foundation of their deployments (Texas Adv Computing Center case study).

If you’re tracking the latest big data & cloud hardware then the Dell PowerEdge C8000 is worth some investigation.

Basically, the Dell C8000 is a chassis that holds a flexible configuration of compute or storage sleds. It’s not a blade frame because the sleds minimize shared infrastructure. In our experience, cloud customers like the dedicated i/o and independence of sleds (as per the Bootstrapping clouds white paper). Those attributes are especially well suited for Hadoop and OpenStack because they support a “flat edges” and scale out design. While i/o independence is valued, we also want shared power infrastructure and density for efficiency reasons. Using a chassis design seems to capture the best of both worlds.

The novelty for the Dell PowerEdge C8000 is that the chassis are scary flexible. You are not locked into a pre-loaded server mix.

There are a plethora of sled choices so that you can mix choices for power, compute density and spindle counts. That includes double-wide sleds positively brimming with drives and expanded GPU processers. Drive density is important for big data configurations that are disk i/o hungry; however, our experience is the customer deployments are highly varied based on the planned workload. There are also significant big data trends towards compute, network, and balanced hardware configurations. Using the C8000 as a foundation is powerful because it can cater to all of these use-case mixes.

That reminds me! Mike Pittaro (our team’s Hadoop lead architect) did an excellent Deploy Hadoop using Crowbar video.

Interested in more opinions about the C8000? Check out Barton George & David Meyer.

OpenStack Deploy Day generates lots of interest, less coding

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Last week, my team at Dell led a world-wide OpenStack Essex Deploy event. Kamesh Pemmaraju, our OpenStack-powered solution product manager, did a great summary of the event results (200+ attendees!). What started as a hack-a-thon for deploy scripts morphed into a stunning 14+ hour event with rotating intro content and an ecosystem showcase (videos).  Special kudos to Kamesh, Andi Abes, Judd Maltin, Randy Perryman & Mike Pittaro for leadership at our regional sites.

Clearly, OpenStack is attracting a lot of interest. We’ve been investing time in content to help people who are curious about OpenStack to get started.

While I’m happy to be fueling the OpenStack fervor with an easy on-ramp, our primary objective for the Deploy Day was to collaborate on OpenStack deployments.

On that measure, we have room for improvement. We had some great discussions about how to handle upgrades and market drivers for OpenStack; however, we did not spend the time improving Essex deployments that I was hoping to achieve. I know it’s possible – I’ve talked with developers in the Crowbar community who want this.

If you wanted more expert interaction, here are some of my thoughts for future events.

  • Expert track did not get to deploy coding. I think that we need to simply focus more even tightly on to Crowbar deployments. That means having a Crowbar Hack with an OpenStack focus instead of vice versa.
  • Efforts to serve OpenStack n00bs did not protect time for experts. If we offer expert sessions then we won’t try to have parallel intro sessions. We’ll simply have to direct novices to the homework pages and videos.
  • Combining on-site and on-line is too confusing. As much as I enjoy meeting people face-to-face, I think we’d have a more skilled audience if we kept it online only.
  • Connectivity! Dropped connections, sigh.
  • Better planning for videos (not by the presenters) to make sure that we have good results on the expert track.
  • This event was too long. It’s just not practical to serve Europe, US and Asia in a single event. I think that 2-3 hours is a much more practical maximum. 10-12am Eastern or 6-8pm Pacific would be much more manageable.

Do you have other comments and suggestions? Please let me know!

Asia-Pac Session for OpenStack Essex Global Deploy day

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I did not want us to neglect Asia-Pac for the upcoming OpenStack Deploy day, so I was delighted when Mike Pittaro offered to help host the online content for the last session. Mike is an OpenStack contributor who recently joined my team at Dell.

This addresses the concern that our first Essex hack day was America’s daytime only so it was difficult for time zones east of GMT to participate.

We are working with Dell teams in Asia-Pac to setup more information to support Japan, China, Korea and Australia.

This picture, taken by Dan Choquette (my team too!), is from Toyko DevOpsDays.