Last week and this, Austin’s downtown has been taken over by the South by Southwest festival (SXSW).  What started out nearly 25 years ago as a music festival/conference has grown to include parallel film and interactive events as well.  During the event every bar and venue downtown is occupied with bands, films or tech companies showing their stuff.

Yesterday Rackspace commandeered the Kung Fu Saloon in the name of the OpenStack project.  As part of this event, and before the drinking began, Dell did a demo of “Crowbar,” our OpenStack installer that we recently announced.

Check out the mini montage below that includes a quick interview I did with Dell solutions engineer Greg Althaus right after he finished the demo.

Don’t take our word for it

Dell is currently field testing crowbar and plans to donate the code to the OpenStack community after testing.  If you are interested in testing crowbar yourself, email us at OpenStack@Dell.com.

Some of the ground the video covers

  • Intro montage: Welcome to the Kung Fu Saloon, setting up and a snippet of the demo
  • [0:40] Talking to Greg
    • What actually is crowbar and how does it work with OpenStack compute and storage?
    • How fast can you spin up a cloud using it?
    • Where does OpsCode’s Chef fit in?
    • Our plan to donate this code to the community after field testing. 

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…