Launch progress; New RedHatters; MIT networking and OSD buy-in

This is the scene from after the NESE launch meeting today: A whole array of cozy outdoor fire pits on the Harvard campus.

There is lots and lots of news:

• The launch team (lead by Scott Yockel of Harvard rc.fas.harvard.edu), is deep into pre-production Ceph testing as we approach real production and now including two more RedHat collaborators (Ben England and Patrick Donnelly) from Sage Weil’s group.
• A 1.2 PB buy-in from the U.S. ATLAS Northeast Tier 2 has arrived.
• Paul Hsi has switch quotes and is in touch with Augustine and Nick Amento.
• Jim Culbert discussed the authentication setup and Globus endpoints.
• Rajiv Shridhar discussed possible use of NESE by MIT/Sloan.
• Orran Krieger and Saul are planning for an S3 endpoint for the Massachusetts Open Cloud team at Boston University.
• Devesh Tiwari of Northeastern is assembling a team to provide a strategic technology outlook for the project for the next few years.
• Chris Hill announced a 1.8 PB buy-in for MIT.

With the latest MIT buy-in, NESE will already begin with more than 50% buy-in, even before we start stable operations. This shows confidence in the project and a promising outlook for long term sustainability, which is one of our main goals. – Saul