This week the OpenStack Design Summit and Conference was held in San Jose, CA. The Zenoss team was there to help support the effort and to learn as much as possible about the future of the Open Cloud.
The main observation from the conference I have to share was on the overall excitement around the effort. For a relatively new project, there was a ton of activity and interest in building and deploying OpenStack Clouds and making the overall community successful. A major kudos to the OpenStack team for putting on an excellent event and bringing in some excellent speakers.
Here are a few of the presentations that were shared during the conference:
Neal Sample, from eBay, provided analysis on the case for the Hybrid Cloud. This presentation had some great internal financial numbers on using the Public Cloud to reduce internal datacenter costs. Neil brought up the interesting point that the public Cloud could cost 4X as their internal operations and still make sense for "Cloud Bursting". Beyond cost savings, Neal also stated, "Even without cost savings, the Cloud is worth it from a business agility perspective."
Barry Cox on Intel's assessment of Openstack. There is a great analysis here of using Facebook's datacenter to calculate the VMs at scale and the potential cost savings from efficient placement and power savings. Intel has a lot going on when it comes to testing the Cloud and is publishing their findings on their Cloudbuilder website.
Rob Hirschfeld, from Dell, was on hand to talk about their Cloud installer, Crowbar. Not only did they cover how the application would take a bare metal machine and deploy the entire OpenStack ecosystem, they also brought a blade server to show it live. It was very impressive to see the demo and to hear that the Crowbar tool will soon be released as open source. Dell's approach is all about automating Cloud deployments and about eliminating manual touch points - a topic we completely agree with.
Bernard Golden, CEO of HyperStatus, talked about the choices for service providers when it comes to offering Cloud solutions. Interesting quote from Bernard, "Each day Amazon Web Services adds enough computing muscle to power one whole Amazon.com circa 2000, when it was a $2.8 billion business." Bernard continued on to discuss Cloud strategies and the options between Enterprise technologies and Commodity.
Make sure to keep an eye on the Openstack blog for more updates and recaps from the conference.
