Demystifying Hyper-convergence and deep dive into Maxta’s OpenStack Integration

Our April session will tackle Hyper-convergence with Maxta as our co-sponsor. We also have a bonus topic with StratoScale reviewing considerations for deploying Cinder .

Hyper-convergence is the process of melding together previously disparate data center resources. It provides the ability to run applications, virtualization, and storage on industry standard servers. Hyper-convergence provides significant benefits by streamlining infrastructure procurement, deployment and management and delivering performance improvements over typical legacy infrastructure.

Maxta has developed integration points with OpenStack to simplify administration. Maxta storage can be managed through the Horizon user interface with Maxta storage integrated through native OpenStack Nova compute and Cinder storage plugins. The Maxta drivers enable OpenStack environments to take advantage of the advanced feature set Maxta provides, including fast snapshots and local block volumes.

Our lead speaker is Arjun Narang, Technical Marketing Engineer. Arjun utilizes engineering and marketing knowledge to implement the Maxta hyper-converged solution in deployments that support the varied technical demands of customer environments. He joined Maxta in 2014 after spending 4 years at VMware as a Quality Engineer, where he worked on automation and testing of several products for the vCloud Suite Interoperability team. Before joining VMware, he completed a double major in Computer Science & Engineering and Economics at UCLA in 2010.

Deploying CINDER in production
This talk by Jeff Margolis of StratoScale provides a brief overview of Cinder command flows, present some common error cases and their solutions, discuss HA deployments, as well as a brief look at what Kilo will bring.

Jeff Margolis, before joining StratoScale, Jeff worked with HPC (high performance computing), Web 2.0, Cloud, Enterprise & financial services organizations to implement complex and performance oriented fabrics/networks. Jeff spent more than six years as the Manager of Presales Engineering & central region FSI Systems Engineer at Mellanox/Voltaire. Jeff holds a BA in Telecommunications from Michigan State University.

Reminders:

• NEW LOCATION - Tech Ranch has moved to 8920 Business Park Dr, Suite 250 , Austin, TX, 78759. This is just down the street from the previous location on Jollyville Rd. Look for the building with the "Meritage Homes" sign.

• There will be light dinner courtesy of Maxta ~ 6:15pm - with networking time till about 6:45pm - we will kick off the speaking sessions ~ 6:45pm.

• If you are interested in giving a Lightening Talk shoot us a note with a topic or just come to the session ready to speak and let us know about your topic when you arrive! Lightening talks are SHORT 5-10 min. max. on a topic of interest to the OpenStack community.