We hope to see you next week at OpenStack Summit 2016!

This year Openstack Summit 2016 is taking place in downtown Austin, just a few miles down the highway from our Round Rock headquarters, and once again we are very excited to be attending and talking about all the many ways we are collaborating with customers and partners to develop agile, flexible, and open solutions. Just some of what we’re featuring in Booth #D6 includes:

Red Hat partnership highlights

From virtualization and cloud to enterprise IT optimization and performance, our co-engineered solutions blend the best of Red Hat technology with Dell’s customer-driven innovation, leading to solutions and services that address real-world needs.

Dell Extreme Scale Infrastructure solutions

Our Datacenter Scalable Solutions (DSS) offerings, together with the Data Center Solutions (DCS) team, are focused on the unique needs of hyperscale and sub-hyperscale customers. Come see our solutions in action in the booth, including the extremely powerful DSS 9000.

Network Functions Virtualization

OpenStack Summit draws a slew of IT professionals from the telecommunications community, where NFV has been gaining serious momentum. As a leader in both SDN and x86 technologies, and thanks to some key partnerships, Dell has been paving the way with OpenStack powered NFV solutions for telecommunications providers, cable operators and mobile operators.

Not to be missed: Sessions and Panels

The Dell team will be participating in a number of panels and sessions over the course of the conference. Here’s a handy list for your reference:

Monday, April 25 

Performance Measuring Tools for the Cloud

The exponential growth of cloud computing services has given rise to the need for standards, specifications and workloads that can be used to evaluate the performance of various cloud offerings. This panel of cloud performance professionals from Dell Red Hat, Intel and AWcloud will focus on the various tools that have been developed to measure the Cloud and how they are being used for OpenStack Cloud implementations.

Cross release themes: Update

As part of the OpenStack planning process, the development teams have started tracking tasks that will span across multiple 6-month cycles. The list of “Themes” was presented to the community at the Tokyo summit. In this session, we will provide an update on the status of these epics as for the Mitaka release and will update the plans for Newton and Ocata.

Cinder Project Update

During Mitaka, the Cinder team has made progress in various areas.  In this panel session, we will provide an update on what has been accomplished in Mitaka and also discuss what may be coming in the Newton release.

Tuesday, April 26

Enabling, managing and orchestrating workloads in an OpenStack environment

A look at how Dell, Intel and AMI worked together on an OpenStack technology demonstration to help companies stand up, manage and orchestrate infrastructure at scale. By coupling hyperscale-inspired infrastructure running Redfish, Intel Rack Scale Architecture, AMI Pod Manager with an open-source software layer, this session will talk about our experiences and observations enabling this functionality, with a look at the challenges and pain points we ran into along the way.

Three’s Company: Are you Jack, Janet, or Chrissy? How teams can work together to create better OpenStack solutions

When Dell realized a need to extend the Dell Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Solution to bring in a “highly available overlay network provider”, they turned to Midokura Enterprise MidoNet. How did Dell and Red Hat then bring Midokura to the table, encouraging all the different teams to work towards one single goal, to produce a “joint multi-partner solution” and deliver the solution in a timely fashion?

How to strike a balance/align between your community work and your employer’s objectives in OpenStack

Many of us work for a vendor, operator, or academic/research organization which has a significant role in the OpenStack ecosystem. We often face the challenge of managing our time and effort between community work and our day job. This panel will share experiences and provide recommendations on how to effectively contribute to the community while meeting our employers’ goals and objectives in OpenStack.

Developing a Policy-driven, Platform-aware and DevOps-friendly Nova Scheduler

The presenters will outline the development of a policy-driven scheduler that allows the Nova administrator (as well as Nova tenant administrators) to control placement decisions by writing policy statements that dictate which VMs or containers can be placed on which hosts. The DevOps-friendly, policy-driven scheduler plugs into the existing scheduler framework, to enable people to easily and quickly express custom scheduling rules and constraints, and at the same time provide assurances related to performance, security, and data integrity.

Performance Measuring with SPEC Cloud (Dell + RedHat)

SPEC Cloud is a new benchmark standard for measuring and characterizing cloud offerings. What is this tool measuring and assessing? Can the results be trusted? This session will explore in detail the emerging SPEC Cloud standard. Learn how performance is measured using SPEC Cloud and how cloud solutions can be optimized to meet the conditions of the Service Level Agreements (SLA) and various performance requirements.

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OpenStack Summit is a fantastic community event, and we can’t wait to see you in person next week. If you’re unable to join us at the Austin convention center, be sure to keep up to date on our news by subscribing to this blog, and follow us on Twitter (accounts are in the sidebar).

About the Author: Brent Doncaster

Brent Doncaster - Senior Strategist, Product Marketing Leveraging his 20+ years of technology experience into the creation of portfolio messaging for Dell EMC Cloud Solutions in support of global marketing campaigns and initiatives in Dell EMC’s Integrated Solutions Group. Twitter: @Brent_BWD