As they said in the Jefferson’s Theme “Moving on Up…”

I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done.
– Buddha

Recently, I decided to leave Dell where I had the amazing opportunity to promote and amplify various Dell cloud solutions. Over the past 18 months I attended and spoke at a variety of cloud conferences and think tanks, wrote over 150 blogs, and even had lunch at the prestigious London School of Economics  (home of 16 Nobel prize winners). The cloud evangelist position at Dell was tremendous and I am grateful for the chance to assist in the establishment of Dell as a cloud provider; however (isn’t there always), new challenges have presented themselves to me.

I have accepted a position at HP where I will undertake the role of Cloud Social Merlin transforming the social methodology and message from HP on their public cloud solutions built on OpenStack. Returning to the promotion of not just HP Cloud but also the broader OpenStack community is fantastic and after a great week in Portland at the recent OpenStack Summit I look forward to doing my part in making OpenStack the standard in enterprise computing.

My twitter account will change to @SpectorTX and my new email is stephen.spector@hp.com. I look forward to this new challenge working at one of the largest technology companies in the world and doing my part to transform the public cloud market on behalf of HP.

For those of you too young to remember the Jefferson’s I present the theme song for you.

It is better to travel well than to arrive.
– Buddha

Open Source Clouds at VIRTu Alley Event

I presented a 30 minute basic overview of the four main open source cloud computing projects this morning at the Dell VKernel VIRTu Alley event. The event was primarily a focus on virtualization with speakers talking about VMware and Microsoft technology over the two days and myself closing out the event talking open source.

Title: Brighten Your Cloudy Future with Open Source
Abstract: As proprietary cloud solutions look to establish themselves in the marketplace, open source technologies are also stepping up to provide customers with the latest innovations and security solutions to meet their needs. This session highlights the four significant IaaS open source cloud projects with basic information, current status, customer examples and why open source clouds matter to you. Who knows, this talk may even lead you to not only using open source, but also becoming a significant contributor.

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/DellCloud/open-source-clouds-at-virtu-alley

Final thoughts, presenting to an audience virtually is rather strange as you have no feedback mechanism to see if what you are saying is making sense or if the audience is bored. I like not having to travel to present information but the lack of feedback during the presentation is tough

OpenStack Summit Next Week – I am Attending

I will be in San Diego next week for the OpenStack Summit and look forward to once again participating in this great community. I am hosting the Introduction to OpenStack Track on Wednesday the 17th with Anne Gentle and have put together my event schedule here.

If anyone wants to get together and discuss Dell and its participation in OpenStack or has questions please feel free to contact me at @SpectorAtDell. I will be blogging daily on the #DellSolves blog  as well as live tweetting the Dell sessions.

Installing and Running Windows 8 Pre-Release

I spent some time this morning trying out the new Windows 8 Pre-Release to see what the fuss is all about. As I have a Windows 7 machine and access to VMware Workstation 8 from Dell, I am running it in a VM.

Steps:

• Download the Windows 8 Pre-Release and Get Key http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/download
• To get Windows 8 Installed in a new VM,I followed these steps http://www.windowsherald.com/2011/10/install-windows-8-on-vmware-workstation.html
• During install, be sure to choose Custom Install otherwise the install will fail as there is no previous version of Windows to overwrite

Thoughts:

• Not clear how to go from a selected item from the default start back to the start page
• IE default is made for people who don’t use a web browser much, not a fan
• Atl-Tab does not offer the start page as an option

Well, I am now stuck without a way to get back to the main start page. Doing a Google search… aha! I have to use the lower left hot corner; wow that was a complex process requiring me to Google a solution – not good.

This blog https://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/251083/a_guide_to_getting_around_the_windows_8_beta_with_a_mouse.html has some good discussions on how to use your mouse in this environment.  I guess we will get used to this OS interface with a mouse but Microsoft clearly is not targeting a mouse user but rather a touchscreen user. Perhaps Microsoft will release a new laptop based on touch to get everyone to move to the new OS – aha, Microsoft Surface at $199 is a major blow to laptop vendors as it gives users an inexpensive option to move from their current laptop.  I see the strategic move by Microsoft in this,

Note –I work at Dell but am not connected to our PC business at all nor do I have any information about our PC or future direction. However, I see what our dilemma is and await our answer to Surface.

OpenStack Foundation Elections are Underway

The Individual Board Member voting is now underway from Aug 20 – 24. To vote, you must be an individual member of the foundation and you will receive a voting email as I did this morning. Each voter gets 8 votes which can be given to 8 people or grouped with less candidates (e.g. Vote for 2 people with 4 votes each).

I am encouraging all members to vote in this important election and here are my 2 favorite candidates (complete list):

• Rob Herschfeld (Principal Architect / OpenStack Lead at Dell) – Rob is a committed developer to the project and has been a great leader on Crowbar and OpenStack promotion from a developer’s perspective.He also has been a big leader in the Austin and Boston OpenStack User Groups.

• Jaesuk  Ahn (Cloud OS Development Team Lead at Korea Telecom) – I met Jaesuk in Seoul where he managed the creation and launch of the Korea OpenStack User Group, He is a long time OpenStack supporter and would bring a great perspective to the board as a customer and non-US representative.

Happy Voting.

NOTE: I was the OpenStack Community Manager in the first year of the community and am now just an Individual Foundation Member