The “Ceph Lords” refer to an elite society of scholars, technologists, and engineers that was founded by Captain Nemo almost 150 years ago.  While on a seafaring exploration 20,000 leagues under the sea, he tangled with a colossal cephalopod that had never been documented before.  Thereafter, the Captain recruited the best and brightest to study nature’s mysteries and apply their discoveries in an effort to advance science and technology.

Over fifty highly esteemed members of the OpenStack community will convene at DreamHost’s San Francisco office on Thursday, February 2^nd.  The theme of this Meetup will be the Ceph storage project and how it’s currently being implemented in production.

Ceph is a massively scalable, open source, distributed storage system.  There has been widespread interest from the OpenStack community in using Ceph’s RADOS Block Device to fill the block storage void in the cloud software stack.  There is also interest in using Ceph’s object store as a potential alternative to Swift.

The OpenStack project has been an important part of Ceph’s development effort.  To learn more about how the Ceph team is contributing to the OpenStack project, visit http://ceph.newdream.net/openstack/ .

RSVP today to save your spot at this upcoming OpenStack Meetup.

Agenda

6:30 PM – Food, drink, & networking

7:15 – Welcome

7:25 – “Introduction to Ceph and DreamHost’s Object Service Deployment”

Ben Cherian, GM of Emerging Tech at DreamHost, will kick off the discussion.  He’ll provide a general overview of the Ceph project.

Tommi Virtanen, Senior File Systems Engineer, will continue the overview from a much more technical perspective.

Carl Perry, Cloud Architect, will finish with a real-world description of the DreamHost object storage service implementation of Ceph.

8:15 – Intermission

8:30 – “OpenStack Block Storage with Ceph”, Christopher MacGown, Co-Founder and CTO of Piston Cloud Computing, Inc.

9:15 – Sessions are complete – more networking

Shhhh! Do you hear that?

Listen!

Close your eyes and really concentrate.

That, my friend, is the sound of about two thousand oversized nerd guts clenching in feverish anticipation of the Southern California Linux Expo!

We can count ourselves among the clenched faithful as both DreamHost and the Ceph team are sponsors of the show this year!

SCALE 10x (it’s the 10th one!) kicks off TOMORROW at the LAX Hilton!

Ceph’s chief architect, Sage Weil, will be speaking at SCALE Sunday, January 22nd, at 4:30pm in the “Los Angeles B” room: “Ceph Distributed Storage System”

If you plan to attend SCALE this year make sure you stop by the Ceph booth (booth #6!) to meet some of our team!

Bring a resume too, because you never know what might happen… Both DreamHost and Ceph have plenty of jobs and not enough people!

Try to get some rest tonight.

Unclench yourself and prepare to be assaulted by an open source love-fest.

Things will get weird.

Whatever your holiday may be, HAPPY IT!

Not-so-long-ago the freshly-remodeled Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, California was the site of the 2011 DreamHost Holiday Party!

As we head into this holiday weekend we wanted to share some photos of the merriment and hijinks that ensued!

Our holiday parties are family-friendly! Unlike our Halloween blowouts!

Disco band The Funky Hippeez provided some live entertainment…

Some celebrities stopped by for photos…

CEO Simon Anderson gave a quick presentation to thank everyone and their families for allowing us to do what we do! He had a little help…

We raffled off some neat stuff too!

At the risk of offending even one of you, “Happy Whatever”!

See you in 2012!

Last Saturday night we held our annual Halloween party at The Edison in Downtown Los Angeles. We loved it so much in 2010 that we decided to do it there again!

And, for the second year in a row, it was glorious!

The very talented Debra Gerson helped us capture the evening in photos and we’ve thrown them up on Flickr. Some of the costumes this year were unreal.

We’re hoping to see you there next year!

All you have to do is get hired. We’ll take it from there!

When we sponsored WordCamp San Francisco this year we didn’t expect to be doing the same thing in our own backyard less than a month later!

The truth is we were so overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of the WordPress community in San Francisco that when we learned WordCamp LA was looking for sponsors, we jumped at the chance! Literally! I jumped up in the air.

Looking back on things I guess jumping around was kind of a strange reaction to have…but that’s how we feel about WordPress and its vibrant community of developers, designers, and users over here!

You make us push ourselves skyward with our legs! Be proud.

DreamHost is proud to be a Platinum sponsor of WordCamp LA 2011, taking place THIS WEEKEND on the Loyola Marymount University campus.

If you’ll be at WordCamp LA keep your eyes peeled for anyone wearing a DreamHost shirt – we’re anxious to meet you and can’t wait to hear your stories!

If you were in or around the San Diego convention center last week, these were hard to miss:

We commissioned a small fleet of these pedal-powered taxis to get people around the city during HostingCon 2011, helping to reduce the city’s carbon footprint if only for a small time.

It also meant that the DreamHost logo was never more than a head-turn away during HostingCon. That was nice, too.

People-powered transportation fits in nicely with our green sensibilities, so these were kind of a no-brainer for us.

Here’s DreamHost CEO, Simon Anderson, showing us how it’s done!

Thanks to Yellow Bike Cab of San Diego for coming through on these. We couldn’t have been happier with the final result.

HostingCon wrapped up this week in downtown San Diego and we found it was a great opportunity for us to do some learnin’, networkin’, and party-throwin’.

We invited vendors, partners, potential partners, competitors, and even any customers in the area to come party with us during the first night of the convention.

And it went off without a hitch! We raffled off some iPads, dropped a few hundred glowing ice cubes into drinks, and had a great time getting to better know some really good people in the industry.

At the end of the night the only thing that had been broken were one highball glass, a few social boundaries, and the seals on almost everything in the minibar at the afterparty.

All in all – a great success!

We learned some good lessons about how things are done at the ol’ HostingCon and are already planning to make next year’s event bigger and better.

We can’t wait to do it all again when HostingCon comes to Boston next year.

Many thanks to our excellent photographer for the evening, Sara France. Without her help, we would not have remembered any of this.

Our love for WordPress and its vibrant community of users, developers, and evangelists knows no bounds.

We’ve watched WordPress grow both in featureset and popularity over the years and have been proud to include it as a staple offering of our one-click software installer.

Which is why we’ve chosen to this year become a “Bling Bling” sponsor of WordCamp San Francisco 2011, going on right now at the Mission Bay Conference Center.

If you’re attending WordCamp this weekend be sure to stop by the DreamHost booth to meet our most WordPress-savvy employees. They may even invite you to a little after-hours get-together that we’re hosting Saturday night.

We’re proud to be associated with WordCamp San Fransisco and can’t wait to meet up with all of you!

DreamHost is coming to San Diego and we’d like to see you there!

http://www.dreamhostparty.com/

HostingCon 2011 will be taking place at the San Diego convention center August 8th-August 11th. We’ll be there too, in large numbers, Tusken Raider-style.

We’re throwing a party Monday night and you are absolutely invited. We’re looking to connect with vendors, partners, potential partners, customers, and even competitors over drinks, music, and games.

Our CEO, Simon Anderson, will be there. More than a dozen key DreamHost employees will be too – getting to know you, fielding your pitches, answering your questions, and taking note of your feedback about all things DreamHost!

Rumor has it that Jim Curry and a small contingent of the OpenStack team will be there as well!

If you’re over 21 and will be in the San Diego area August 8th, we’d love to see you there whether you’re attending HostingCon or not.

Visit http://www.dreamhostparty.com/ today to RSVP!

Once you’ve registered for this free event we’ll email you the secret password to get in the door 24 hours before it begins.

Come out and play with us!

Next week we’ll be attending the Open Source convention by which all others are measured: O’Reilly’s OSCON 2011.

The OSCON schedule is extensive and, quite frankly, a little overwhelming!

DreamHost’s own Ben Cherian will be making appearances on stage at two sessions:

Prying Open the Cloud with Dell Crowbar and OpenStack
10:40am Thursday, 07/28/2011
Location: E141

OpenStack + Ceph
1:40pm Thursday, 07/28/2011
Location: E141

Ben will be joined at OSCON by DreamHost’s CEO Simon Anderson and some of our finest system administrators!

Our meeting calendar is filling up fast, but if you’d like to have a sit-down with us in Portland next week, be sure to contact events@dreamhost.com.

No time for meetings? No worries – DreamHost reps will also be in the OpenStack booth on the expo floor Wednesday between 1 and 3pm!

Look out Portland!