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Showing posts from January, 2013

Democratizing Storage

Or, you control your bits Traditional storage solutions gravitated towards some central bank of disks - SAN, NAS, Fiber Channel, take your pick, they share a few traits that are not very democratic: They cost lots, and large parts of the cost is Intellectual Property embedded in the solution (i.e. the markup on the underlying hardware is huge) The OEM makes lots of trade-off decisions for you - e.g. ratio of controllers to disks, replication policies and lots of others (most OEM's graciously expose some options that the user can control, but those are just a tiny fraction) They typically require 'forklift updates' - if you use up your capacity, call the forklift to install the next increment, which typically requires a forklift worth of equipment On the plus side, in general those type of systems provide you with reliable, performant storage solution (based on the $$$ you spend, you get more of either qualities). But, in the world of large scale deployments ba

Openstack 'secret sauce'

Or, some less than obvious reasons why refactoring is "A Good Thing" At a meetup tonight, someone challenged me to explain what's really good about Openstack. This was in the context of Openstack-Boston /  Chef-Boston discussion about Openstack and the effort around Community deployment cookbooks, and an approach that uses Pull From Source (which I'll post about in a later date). While I could have spent lots of time describing the CI testing infrastructure and the great work done by Monty and his team, frankly that's not unique to Openstack. It's an enabler for lots of other things. To me, one of the primary sources of excellence in Openstack is the courage to refactor. Not too long ago, there were only 2 services - Nova for Compute, and Swift for Object storage. In Grizzly, through large efforts, there are dedicated services with clear focus and dedicated team passionate about the technology area each services. One of the first refactors was Key