Solving Big Data Problems with OpenIO - Interview with CEO Laurent Denel

The so called “big data problem” (where you have massive amounts of data is that growing uncontrollably) is no longer only the problem of the “YouTubes” of the world. Just about every enterprise out there has a big data problem, of some kind. As Scott Lowe wrote in “Your Data is Useless“, IT organizations are struggling with how much data to keep and, for what they do keep, how to store it and how to analyze it to turn it into valuable information that can make a difference for the company.
Recently at OpenStack Summit, I was honored to interview Laurent Denel, the founder and CEO of object storage company- OpenIO. During the interview I learned about the use cases for OpenIO, how OpenIO is based on opensource, and how easy it is to get started. With OpenIO you are able to converge applications and object storage on the same infrastructure. According to Laurent, you can store, protect, serve and process any data on any hardware at unlimited scale.
You can watch the video to learn for yourself OR move on down to my steps on how to deploy OpenIO, below.

How to Deploy OpenIO in VirtualBox with Vagrant

My interest in trying OpenIO was peaked when I saw the OpenIO getting started challenge. It looked so easy. I already had VirtualBox installed (which isn’t hard to do) and I already had Vagrant installed as well (again, easy to do). So, all I had to do, according to their website, was to run these 2 commands on a prompt:

# OIO_PROFILE=vagrant-swift vagrant up
# vagrant up

As you can see above – it worked!
Note: I doubt that it makes much of a difference but I’m running this on a Macbook Pro with OS X 10.11 El Capitan.
Now I won’t post the huge log of everything that happened when I ran vagrant up but it happened within about a minute and, after that, my VirtualBox spun up, created a new OpenIO VM, and powered it on (as you see below).

There was, of course, a login prompt on the OpenIO VM console but I used vargrant ssh to gain access to a login prompt, like this.

From here I could configure OpenIO with openio command, as you see below.

For more information on OpenIO’s CLI, see the OpenIO Documentation. There is also access through OpenStack Swift and the AWS s3 command line.
For example, you can use Cyberduck.IO or ExpanDrive to access your OpenIO object store – using a GUI interface. I’m going to try that, then try deploying a 3 node OpenIO cluster with WebUI in under 5 minutes, as shown in the video below-