Customer profile

Company: DreamHost®

Country: United States

Industry: Hosting

Employees: 100+

Web: www.dreamhost.com

Business needDreamHost needed an OpenStack™ cloud, and sought out a technology provider to partner with on hardware and software.

SolutionDell™ provided an OpenStack Cloud solution made up of PowerEdge™ C servers and Crowbar software that met DreamHost’s needs.

“Dell’s commitment to OpenStack and their team with deep expertise in Data Center Solutions is the foundation for a great partnership.” Ben Cherian, general manager of emerging technologies, DreamHost

DreamHost expands cloud and storage services with Dell OpenStack Cloud

Benefits

• Took advantage of Dell’s OpenStack expertise in reference architecture and deployment framework

• Saved four to six months of software development work

• Leveraged proven platforms for cloud and scale-out data centers

• Realized the business advantages of leasing with Dell Financial Services

• Cloudcomputing• Opensourcecloud• Webhosting• Serviceproviders

The rise of a new storage solution“The way DreamHost has evolved, we’re very much about automating and making the company very efficient,” says Bryan Bogensberger, DreamHost’s vice president for business strategy. “We have our own software, our own panel, our own provisioning systems. We basically run our own cloud. We can move accounts around and migrate them between shared machines and virtual private servers with the push of a button. That’s pretty unique in the hosting world.”

Building on this legacy of automation and innovation in the hosting world, DreamHost has developed a groundbreaking open-source storage solution called Ceph™. This distributed network storage and file system, which has been in development for the better part of a decade, can manage many petabytes of storage. The system is designed to provide excellent performance, reliability, and scalability.

“Existing solutions are typically expensive and hard to scale,” Bogensberger says. “The advent of the cloud has made people more aware that autoscaling is a benefit, and autoscaling of a storage solution is important. So we created the Ceph solution to replace today’s expensive storage options and also to fit into this world that we envisioned a long time ago, which was a world of autoscale.”

Moving to OpenStack and CrowbarDreamHost was in need of a flexible, open source cloud platform for their

public cloud compute product, and concluded that OpenStack was the right route. One of DreamHost’s requirements was offering Ceph-based block storage to their cloud compute customers, so they joined the OpenStack project and committed engineering resources focused on integrating Ceph with OpenStack. DreamHost also required a technology partner that was as committed to OpenStack as they were. It became clear that Dell was a natural technology partner for this endeavor.

Dell was one of the few pioneer partners in the OpenStack community

Since its inception in the 1990s, DreamHost™ has kept a laser-sharp focus on automation and efficiency. This long-running focus has helped keep the California-based Web-hosting company at the forefront of a highly competitive industry. And they’re always looking for more efficient ways of doing things.

That was the case when the company decided to deploy the Dell™ OpenStack™ Cloud solution, featuring PowerEdge™ C servers. To accelerate the deployment process and save months of coding time, DreamHost became one of the early adopters of Crowbar, a Dell developed, open source software framework, created to speed the deployment of a multi-node OpenStack Cloud to just a few hours, instead of days when done manually.

“If Dell tried to have a sales person sell us, we probably wouldn’t have bought it. Dell solved a problem that we had. And when Dell solved that problem, our engineers thought, ‘We’re going to use this.’”

Ben Cherian, general manager of emerging technologies, DreamHost

Technology at work

Solution

Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution

Hardware

PowerEdge R510 rack servers

PowerEdge C2100 rack servers

PowerEdge C6100 rack servers or

PowerEdge C6105 rack servers

Software

OpenStack Cloud software

Dell-developed Crowbar

Services

Dell ProSupport—Data Centers

Dell Server, Storage & Networking Deployment

in July 2010, which has now grown to more than 80 companies and 1,100 developers worldwide. In fact, Dell was the only hardware solutions provider to publicly support OpenStack at its announcement. Since then, Dell has been visible in the OpenStack community, working with customers and key partners to develop reference architectures, design infrastructure, and develop open source software.

In an effort to help customers streamline their journey to the cloud, Dell has released the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution. This solution is enabled with optimized Dell™ PowerEdge™ C hardware configurations, services from Dell and Rackspace Cloud Builders, and the community-celebrated Crowbar software framework, developed by Dell’s OpenStack experts.

Crowbar is software that leverages capabilities in Chef, an open source systems integration framework from Opscode, built for cloud automation. It’s designed to deploy multi-node OpenStack clouds on bare metal servers in as little as two hours. To make things even easier, Dell develops modular “barclamps” that are used to attach new capabilities to Crowbar. For example, barclamps are available for DNS, discovery, Nova, Swift, Nagios, Gangalia, and BIOS configuration, and additional barclamps are in development.

In the Crowbar framework, nearly every capability of the system is expressed as a barclamp. This means that the code base can be expanded and updated in a modular manner. It

also means that users can develop their own barclamps.

As it laid the groundwork for its OpenStack cloud, DreamHost decided that Crowbar, and its use of Chef, provided them with right tools for their project.

“Crowbar and Chef solved problems in an elemental kind of way,” Cherian says. “It was designed for the needs of a service provider. If Dell had not developed Crowbar, we would have been forced to write a similar tool ourselves. It’s a fundamental goal that we have in the company: automate, automate, automate. That’s how we drive down prices.”

Cherian estimates that the use of Crowbar is saving DreamHost four to six months of development time. So Dell’s OpenStack solution with Crowbar was a no-brainer.

“We’re technologists at heart, and we decided on our own, based on our interests, that we needed a technology to do something like this in order to automate our deployment,” he says. “When we bumped into this product we realized it was a great fit. If Dell tried to have a sales person sell us, we probably wouldn’t have bought it. Dell solved a problem that we had. And when Dell solved that problem, our engineers thought, ‘We’re going to use this.’”

WorkingwithDellDreamHost uses Dell hardware for its core business—shared hosting, dedicated hosting and virtual private server hosting—as well as its emerging businesses. The company uses Dell

Video »Bryan Bogensberger, DreamHost’s vice president for business strategy

“If Dell had not developed Crowbar, we would have been forced to write a similar tool ourselves. It’s a fundamental goal that we have in the company: automate, automate, automate. That’s how we drive down prices.”

Ben Cherian, general manager of emerging technologies, DreamHost

PowerEdge R510 rack servers, Dell PowerEdge C2100 rack servers, and Dell PowerEdge C6100 and/or C6105 rack servers.

For the provisioning of its OpenStack cloud compute product, DreamHost is using the Crowbar barclamp for Nova. In addition, the company is writing its own barclamp for its Ceph storage solution.

Dell had another important piece of the infrastructure puzzle: financing. While DreamHost historically has paid cash for the hardware it buys, Dell Financial Services offered leasing options, which can be particularly valuable to a company in a growth mode.

“Buying hardware from Dell was also of interest because of the plans we have to grow in these multiple areas,” Bogensberger says. “We started to think about using cash efficiently. The Dell finance group makes that very easy for us. It’s very nice to have that option. Otherwise, we would be buying all our servers with cash. Having an efficiently managed blanket lease with a vendor is a big deal. We understand each other.”

DreamHost and Dell are closely aligned at multiple levels, Cherian notes. This alignment goes far beyond the fact that Dell makes data center products and DreamHost operates data centers.

“What’s more important is the fact that we’re both aligned on this OpenStack project,” Cherian says. “We’re talking to the same people. We already understand the integration points. When we talk about our roadmap and the Dell roadmap, there are a lot of things that align very nicely, and I can’t say the same for Dell’s competitors in this business. The big competitors are not doing this as well.”

Cherian describes his company’s relationship with Dell and its Data Center Solutions (DCS) team as both productive and mutually rewarding.

“We’ve had great pleasure and success working with the DCS group,” he says. “We’ve had our engineers on direct calls with the engineers who are building this product. We’ve had great interaction. Because of the work we have done we know that we’re going to be able to launch on PowerEdge C hardware. It’s helpful to have a partner like Dell that understands technology and understands how we use it, and can help us achieve our business goals.”

Ultimately, Dell had all the right pieces for DreamHost as it moves toward its OpenStack Cloud.

“The hardware made us more efficient,” Bogensberger says. “The services, from sales to financing, made the process easy and improved our capital management, because of leasing. And on the software side, Dell gave us a real option as opposed to writing code ourselves—for how we automate provisioning for OpenStack and for our Ceph product. Without Crowbar, we’d be writing code, and that costs us money. Having a viable, open-source solution for deploying OpenStack and deploying Ceph are very important, very core, to our business.”

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For more information on the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution and Crowbar, visit Dell.com/OpenStack, or email OpenStack@Dell.com

Video »Ben Cherian, general manager of emerging technologies, DreamHost

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