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Dell, Opscode and Rackspace Demonstrate First Fully Automated Provisioning of Multi-Node Openstack Compute Clouds

Leading Cloud Infrastructure Vendors Demonstrate OpenStack Capabilities at Cloud Connect Conference

Santa Clara, California – March 8, 2011 – Today, at the Cloud Connect conference, Dell, Opscode and Rackspace® are providing a demonstration of the first fully automated provisioning of a multi-node OpenStack™ cloud during an OpenStack meet up at the Cloud Connect conference. Combining Dell’s newly announced OpenStack installer and Opscode’s Chef open source software for cloud infrastructure automation, it is possible to provision an OpenStack compute cloud from bare metal hardware in one hour.  The OpenStack open source cloud project, founded just 7 months ago, has earned rapid industry support with more than 50 organizations now participating in the project, which is intended to create an open and standard cloud operating system.

“There’s a tremendous amount of interest in the OpenStack community around seeing complete, ready to deploy cloud platforms based on OpenStack,” said Michael Cote, Analyst at RedMonk. “The effort by Dell, Opscode, and Rackspace is a great example of partners advancing the OpenStack initiative. The work they’re doing to bring together hardware, automation, and the cloud platform into a near push button cloud setup should provide a very interesting offering.”

The three companies will be demonstrating live OpenStack deployments during an OpenStack meet up at the Cloud Connect conference, providing attendees with an end-to-end, guided tour of one of the most rapid methods of building a cloud.  In this demonstration, leveraging the Dell installer tool, each server node will boot from bare-metal, register itself with the admin server, obtain a base operating system and be assigned its role in the OpenStack infrastructure. Servers will be updated with all of the latest packages and be automatically configured by Opscode’s Chef to provide their services in the OpenStack infrastructure.

“The efforts by Opscode and Dell to automate the provisioning of OpenStack Compute clouds can help enterprises and service providers, who are deploying OpenStack today, get up and running quickly and efficiently,” said Jim Curry, General Manager of Rackspace Cloud Builders, providing services for OpenStack. “It is amazing to see how the OpenStack community and technology is advancing rapidly through industry collaboration and important contributions by open source community members.”

For more information about each company’s participation, please visit www.Dell.com/OpenStack or www.rackspace.com/cloudbuilders. For more information about OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system, please visit www.openstack.org.

About Dell

Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) listens to customers and delivers worldwide innovative technology, business solutions and services they trust and value. Dell Services develops and delivers a comprehensive suite of services and solutions in applications, business process, consulting, infrastructure and support to help customers succeed. For more information, visit www.dell.com.

About Opscode

Opscode is the leader in cloud infrastructure automation and provides the Opscode Platform, a widely used hosted service for configuration management and infrastructure automation. Opscode delivers Chef, the open source configuration management and integration framework used by thousands of organizations to manage and scale infrastructure. Founded in 2008, Opscode’s management team includes experts responsible for creating and operating some of the world’s largest websites and cloud computing platforms. More information can be found at http://www.opscode.com.

About Rackspace Hosting

Rackspace Hosting is the world’s leading specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry, and the founder of OpenStack, an open source cloud platform. The San Antonio-based company provides Fanatical Support® to its customers, across a portfolio of IT services, including Managed Hosting and Cloud Computing. In 2010, Rackspace was recognized by Bloomberg BusinessWeek as a Top 100 Performing Technology Company and listed on the InformationWeek 500 as one of the nation’s most innovative users of business technology. The company was also positioned in the Leaders Quadrant by Gartner Inc. in the “2010 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service and Web Hosting.” For more information, visit www.rackspace.com.

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Jay Wampold

Former Chef Employee