Tag Archives: Flat Edge

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.

Dell to spin bare iron into OpenStack gold

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I’m at the CloudConnect conference today supporting my team’s initial OpenStack foray.   Our announcement part of the Rackspace Cloud Builders announcement.

Tonight (3/8), we’re at the Rackspace Launch with a pony rack of servers (6 nodes) where we will run a LIVE DEMO of our cloud installer (codename “Crowbar”).  The initial offer includes my hyperscale white paper and our cloud foundation kit.

Interested in the details?  Here are background posts that talk about the Lean/Agile process we use, what is Crowbar, and my write up about hyperscale (“flat edge”) data centers.

Added 3/9: Links to articles about the release:

Here’s what Dell is saying about OpenStack on Dell.com/openstack:

Dell is one of the original partners in the OpenStack community, which has now grown to more than 50 companies and participants. To accelerate adoption of this powerful platform, Dell has worked to develop an effortless out-of-box OpenStack experience with:
  • Optimized PowerEdge™ C-based hardware configurations
  • A technical whitepaper that details the design of an OpenStack hyperscale cloud on PowerEdge C server technology
  • An OpenStack installer that allows bare metal deployment of OpenStack clouds in a few hours (vs. a manual installation period of several days)

Read more about the steps to design an OpenStack hyperscale cloud in a Dell technical whitepaper entitled “Bootstrapping OpenStack Clouds.”

Interested?  Contact OpenStack@Dell.com.