I had the pleasure last week of working with a Bothell-based hardware vendor, Silicon Mechanics, and a company called Private Cloud Leasing to get CloudStack up and running on what is literally a datacenter on wheels (the small unit in the picture).

We took this Cloud-on-Wheels to the LinuxFest Northwest show at Bellingham Technical College, and put it on the expo hall floor.

On Sunday, we unplugged it and rolled it out of the expo hall, across the plaza, and up to one of the classrooms for the CloudStack session. The unit itself is self-propelled, runs on UPS,  and you can basically move it around any building that is wheelchair accessible.

The Cloud-on-Wheels generated A LOT OF ATTENTION (it’s very blue) and thus was a great draw to the booth and session.  As we rolled the unit through the hallways of the college, it was a bit like the Pied Piper…we had a group of folks following us, curious to see what we were doing with this thing. 

For the hardware geeks among us—here’s the spec for the unit we had at the show:

- (1) chassis and CPU set aside for system management

-(2) 2U chassis, each 4 has blades with (2) six core CPUs

-(12) 3.5 inch disk on each 2U chassis (accessible from the front)

-10 TB of shared iSCSI storage, 1 TB of SDD 4 TB of 10,000 RPM disk and 5TB of 7200 RPM disk

-For debugging/perf monitoring, we had the Anue Network Tool Optimizer routing traffic to the Network Instruments Gigastor

-CloudStack 3.0.1 with XenServer 6.0.2 nodes

 Silicon Mechanics’ facebook page with some LinuxFest Northwest pictures: http://www.facebook.com/SiliconMechanics

Mobile cloud computing...it doesn't get any better than this!