ScaleUp is a Managed Hosting Provider. The company develops highly available Cloud and Business Hosting Solutions for systems houses and companies in Germany. At their Data Center locations in for example Berlin, Hamburg and Dusseldorf, ScaleUp supports almost 900 clients with the development and operation of their Managed IT Systems.
At the OpenInfra Summit of 2022 in Berlin, Christoph held a presentation about using OCP gear (Open Compute Project gear) for both servers and network switches to build a more sustainable cloud with OpenStack. The goal of the talk was to inform other users and providers of OpenStack about using OCP gear and its benefits (mainly power efficiency). One of the challenges in integrating OCP hardware into the deployment is manageability. OCP prescribes manageability of OCP platforms and racks using the Redfish interface standard. The Redfish Forum has contributed to open-source efforts to enable OpenStack’s use of the Redfish interface.
After the presentation, we held an interview with Cristoph Streit. Cristoph is the CEO and co-founder of ScaleUp. You can read the summery of the interview in this blog!
What is the most exciting thing you saw so far on this summit?
I talked with someone at the summit, the very first day that I was here, and we both agreed there is not exciting news, but I actually see that as a positive thing. I somehow get the feeling that OpenStack is finally everywhere and set. The whole community is involved in developing instead of just finding the next big and exciting hype.
What is the most important news from your company?
We are making big bets on becoming more sustainable. So next week we will be opening a new data centre here in Berlin, which will eventually use it excesses to grow algae. The exhaust air of datacenters is the ideal temperature for algae cultivation.
What has been the most challenging for you during the last couple of years?
Certainly, the Covid situation was challenging. However, on the one hand, it actually helped us to get a bigger footprint because there is more and more need, for well, anything digital nowadays.
What open source development has been most important for ScaleUp recently?
We have been heavy users of OpenStack for many years now and we are also users of Ceph and a few years ago we also introduced a managed Kubernetes offering. So, for us the so called LOKI stack has been really important.
What future open source developments would you like to see?
For us as a service writer, providing infrastructures to other companies the most important thing is stability and good performance. So, we don’t really need hundreds of new features. We are more concerned about having a stable infrastructure. So to say, that is more important to us than anything else.
Can you share what you are going to talk about at your keynote here at the summit?
We will have a talk about how we built an OpenStack cloud on open compute hardware. We will explain how we are not only using open source on the software side but nowadays also open hardware on the hardware side.
The interview of Christoph can be found here: https://youtu.be/BpjXbPHNhsA
The full presentation of Christoph can be found here: https://youtu.be/AFZAY_KRw9g
That was our interview with Christoph Streit. From this interview, I think that we can conclude that ScaleUp mainly focuses on stability and consistency, but also look at improving sustainability and take major steps forward here. Is there anything that you would like to ask Cristoph or ScaleUp? Let us know in the comment section!
