Blue Box to Present at DevOps Summit Silicon Valley and OpenStack Summit Paris

SEATTLE, Wash., October 1, 2014 — During the first week of November, cloud experts from Blue Box—a Seattle-based provider of on-demand private cloud as a service (PCaaS) on dedicated hardware—will take the dais on two continents to discuss the merits and challenges of deploying OpenStack as a cloud platform.

Jesse Proudman, Blue Box founder and CTO, and Craig Tracey, engineering lead for Blue Box Cloud (Blue Box’s PCaaS offering), will present at the OpenStack Summit Paris (booth E33) held November 3-7, in Paris, France. Myles Steinhauser, a software engineer at Blue Box, will present November 4 at the Cloud Expo/DevOps Summit Silicon Valley (booth 711) in Santa Clara, California.

The four presentations, with links to the session websites, are shown below in order of occurrence:

Ask the Experts: OpenStack as a Service or as a Distribution?

Jesse Proudman
November 3, 5:10 pm CET
OpenStack Summit

Proudman will join an “all-star” panel discussion regarding the merits and challenges of deploying OpenStack as either a distribution or as a service. This panel discussion will be recorded as a "Speaking in Tech" Podcast which is distributed by Europe's largest tech publication, The Register. Discussion topics will include:

• Implications for hardware and software on-premises / off-premises
• Enterprise considerations for control of data and security
• Legal implications for off-site data (i.e. Microsoft Azure Ireland court order)
• Cost considerations
• Maturity of distributions and service providers

Joining Proudman on the panel will be Jan Mark Holzer, Red Hat; Kenneth Hui, EMC; Caroline McCrory, Gigaom; Manju Ramanathpura, HDS; and Boris Renski, Mirantis.

The OpenStack Thunderdome

Jesse Proudman
November 4, 4:40 pm CET
OpenStack Summit

In this session, Proudman will join four other highly opinionated OpenStack innovators—Randy Bias, Cloudscaling; Alex Freedland, Mirantis; Chris Kemp, Nebula; and Joshua McKenty, Piston—to debate the best way to bring about global dominance of OpenStack as the default cloud-building platform. Each panelist will argue his case for the roles that distros, appliances, managed services, PCaaS, public cloud, consulting/training/DIY and the Foundation have to play in leveraging OpenStack’s meteoric rise to prominence into the dominant cloud-building platform it seems destined to become. Moderating this session will be Caroline McCrory of GigaOm Research.

Swiss Private School Chooses OpenStack for Security & Sovereignty

Myles Steinhauser
November 4, 11:35 am PST
DevOps Summit

Seeking to meet rigid data sovereignty and data integrity requirements while offering flexible, on-demand cloud resources to users, Leysin American School, a private boarding school in Leysin, Switzerland, identified OpenStack as the clear choice to round out the school's cloud strategy. The school selected Blue Box Cloud, an OpenStack-powered private cloud as a service offering and leveraged Blue Box's Zurich, Switzerland data center. In this session, Steinhauser will discuss why this deployment option might be attractive to other educational institutions and companies that are hyper-focused on securing student, customer, patient or member data.

Tales from the Trenches: The Good, Bad and Ugly of OpenStack Operations

Craig Tracey
November 5, 5:20 pm CET
OpenStack Summit

Operating an OpenStack cloud is not a trivial endeavour. In this session, Tracey and John Dewey of Cisco will discuss what it takes to actually operate an OpenStack cloud in production, from the perspective of cloud operators who each have more than three years of first-hand experience operating OpenStack clouds across dozens of deployments.

About Blue Box

Blue Box is a pioneering Private Cloud as a Service (PCaaS) provider with a worldwide customer base. Blue Box’s technology platform leverages decades of operational expertise in cloud and distributed systems to deliver Blue Box Cloud—a managed, hosted private cloud on dedicated hardware, powered by OpenStack and available and scalable on demand. Blue Box Cloud delivers core benefits of both public and private clouds in one offering. Blue Box meets the control, performance, and security needs of customers in a wide range of industries, including healthcare, financial services, digital media, gaming, technology and retail. Learn more about Seattle-based Blue Box at bluebox.net or find Blue Box on Twitter at @bluebox.