Earlier this morning at OSCON, our friends at Dell launched an exciting new offering, the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution. Dell’s new offering includes a reference architecture based on Dell PowerEdge C Series servers and incorporates the Crowbar software framework (with Chef built in!) for the deployment and management of OpenStack clouds.
At Opscode, we’re excited about this launch for a number of reasons:
1) Dell’s launch is yet another big momentum boost for OpenStack. Dell and Opscode share an early commitment to OpenStack and a belief that the future of computing will be open, flexible and backed by a community of experts. Dell’s experience and expertise in scaling out large server infrastructure environment’s (ie, Facebook, Windows Azure, many others) makes today’s launch a very big endorsement of open source cloud infrastructure technologies generally and of OpenStack specifically.
2) Chef is the tool of choice for building large-scale cloud environments. The Dell team chose to include Chef as the configuration management and systems integration tool to embed in Crowbar and we’ve had a blast working with them since early this year to make Crowbar sing.
3) The Chef community is deeply involved. Among the companies directly involved in providing the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution, both Dell and Rackspace are corporate contributors to Chef. In addition, the folks at Dreamhost (featured as a key adopter of the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution) just signed on as contributors last week! Needless to say, we continue to be humbled by the many smart and experienced infrastructure companies joining us.
If you are a Chef user interested in learning more about the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution and how to start an evaluation, let us know! We are happy to help out, and to connect you to the right folks at Dell to begin working with.
– The Opscode Team