Month: May 2014

This podcast series explores topics of interest to OpenStack practitioners, focusing on the ecosystem in Israel.

In this episode I speak with Dagan Gilat, Senior Manager of Cloud Platforms at IBM Haifa Research Lab.

Highlights from the podcast:

• The major areas of focus of the IBM Haifa Research Center.

• How cloud computing workloads have changed over the years.

• As workloads need to bridge the gap across from traditional style to cloud style architectures, OpenStack becomes more interesting….

• IBM’s initial contributions to OpenStack were in the areas of enabling IBM storage products, and maintaining HA despite certain kinds of hardware failures. Later contributions include the areas of resource management and VM placement, storage – Swift and Cinder – including secure multitenancy, on-demand data migration, and networking contributions.

• Interesting lesson from the OpenStack Summit in Altanta last week: OpenStack is a mature system that can handle a fairly complex and heterogeneous environment that includes many types of computational abstracts – containers, vms, bare metal servers – and many types of hypervisors.

• The initial challenge with OpenStack was in climbing the learning curve. It was difficult to bring up the environment, networking configuration was complex, automation tools were lacking. These areas have improved, and several alternatives are available – so the challenge today is to choose a solution wisely. The key to choosing is to evaluate the options carefully, with the help of an experienced partner.

• Most companies will choose a distribution instead of adopting the vanilla OpenStack project.

• The main obstacle facing OpenStack today is its complexity. Each subproject within OpenStack will succeed or fail based on the quality of its technical leadership.

• From IBM’s experience in keeping large clusters of OpenStack up and running, it’s important to ensure you only upgrade to stable versions, and it’s equally important to ensure that, like the technology, your operational processes are mature.

Shlomo Swidler’s OpenStackIL Podcast Episode 12: Dagan Gilat of IBM

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This podcast series explores topics of interest to OpenStack practitioners, focusing on the ecosystem in Israel.

In this episode I speak with Nelson Nahum, CEO and founder of Zadara Storage. We talk about:

• What does Zadara Storage do and how do you use OpenStack?
• How easy or difficult have you found it to keep up with the changing APIs across releases, especially in the early days of OpenStack? What should OpenStack users do to keep up
• What challenges have you had with using OpenStack?
• What do you think of RedHat’s acquisition of Inktank, creators of storage provider Ceph that is popular in OpenStack deployments?
• What lessons have you learned from your experience operating several large scale OpenStack deployments?
• How can we get an OpenStack Summit to happen in Israel?

Shlomo Swidler’s OpenStackIL Podcast Episode 11: Nelson Nahum of Zadara Storage

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This podcast series explores topics of interest to OpenStack practitioners, focusing on the ecosystem in Israel.

In this episode I speak with Yaron Haviv, VP of Datacenter and Storage Solutions at Mellanox. We talk about:

• Why is OpenStack interesting for Mellanox today?
• What lessons are being learned by Mellanox’s customers using OpenStack?
• What are you doing to leverage your lessons learned from customer and internal use?
• What is the scale of OpenStack use and skills within Mellanox?
• What are Mellanox customers doing with OpenStack, and how are you helping them?
• Why is OpenStack important to Mellanox for the future?
• When and why did you know that OpenStack was worthy of serious consideration?
• What will you present about at the upcoming OpenStack Israel event?
• What advice would you give someone just starting to get familiar with OpenStack?

Shlomo Swidler’s OpenStackIL Podcast Episode 10: Yaron Haviv of Mellanox

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