Bare-metal magic at the Open Compute Summit

by Canonical on 14 November 2014

In the week before the OpenStack Summit, Mark Shuttleworth was a keynote speaker at the Open Compute Summit (OCP) in Paris.

Mark gave an overview of the evolution of bare-metal systems, especially in the context of scale-out workloads. The highlight of the speech however, were the live demos he gave.

The first demo was a fully automated Windows 2012 R2 Hyper-V Server deployment using MAAS. MAAS can also provision CentOS, SUSE, as well as Ubuntu and Windows.

After deploying the operating system, Mark went ahead and deployed mySQL and WordPress using Juju, thereby demonstrating the ease of deploying the SaaS layer without any need of familiarity with the application being deployed.

The “bare-metal trifecta” came next, where Mark spun up three large scale-out services on Ubuntu orange boxes: big data (including Hadoop, Hive, mySQL, and ElasticSearch), OpenStack, and Cloud Foundry.

Next, Mark demonstrated MAAS running at The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). Remotely connecting to the UTSA servers, Mark used the new Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack to create a region called “San Antonio” on a cloud called “utexas”. Using KVM as a hypervisor, and Ceph for storage, the hardware Mark used consisted of 856 cores, 5.5 TB of RAM, and 90 TB of disk.

UTSA is among the United States’ leading universities in cloud computing research. The university is home to the largest open cloud in academia. It supports education, advanced computing and data analytics research, allowing UTSA scholars to collaborate with partners and industry experts around the world.

With 10,000 processor cores, the UTSA Open Cloud is capable of processing massive amounts of big data. This fall, the National Science Foundation awarded a $10 million collaborative grant to University of Chicago, the University of Texas at Austin, UTSA, Ohio State, and Northwestern University to design and build OpenStack-based SuperCloud such as Chameleon for scientific and engineering computing.

UTSA is also home to the 1st North American Open Compute Certification and Solution Laboratory. The laboratory provides a neutral, third-party, community-based approach to innovation and research in collaboration with industry. The laboratory provides unique learning and research opportunities for UTSA students and researchers and nurtures partnerships with leaders in the technology industry. UTSA is a partner of Ubuntu and Canonical, providing a great test bed for Canonical’s cloud tools, especially MAAS.

Finally, Mark used hardware from Applied Micro to demonstrate how all of the above mentioned tools and solutions can be deployed on x86, POWER, and ARM architectures.

For more details on everything Mark has demoed, please browse through our cloud pages.