OpenPastures: enterprise test automation, open-sourced by Dell.
A distributed test automation and performance tracking platform Joseph Dattilo built for Dell’s proprietary server caching hardware — released by Dell on its official open-source site when the division wound down. Inside Dell it was known as the Cattle Suite.
Proprietary hardware, industrial-scale testing
Dell’s server caching hardware had to be validated continuously: every branch, every commit, every build, across fleets of test machines. At that scale, test automation stops being a script and becomes a platform — something that schedules runs, parses logs, tracks performance over time, and tells engineers the truth about what changed.
OpenPastures was that platform, built by Joseph Dattilo as a senior software engineer under contract at Dell — years before Date Palm Media existed. It’s on this site as founder track record, not a company credit: this is the person you’d actually be hiring.
Distributed, continuous, and trusted
The hard part of enterprise test infrastructure is not running a test — it is coordinating thousands of them across machines while keeping the results trustworthy. The platform had to manage builds and test runs across a distributed harness, survive flaky hardware, and reduce mountains of log output into performance reporting engineers would act on.
A central dashboard for the whole pipeline
- Build and test-run management — branches, commits, builds, and runs coordinated across machines at scale.
- Log parsing — raw output turned into structured, searchable results.
- Performance reporting — hardware performance tracked over time, regressions surfaced.
- Situation reports — a central dashboard giving the team one view of the whole harness.
Public code, public record
When Dell wound down the division, they open-sourced the complete codebase — published in 2016 as OpenPastures on Dell’s official open-source site (inside Dell it had been the Cattle Suite). The code is public on GitHub today under the GPL-3.0 license, which makes this the rare case study you can read line by line.
The platform’s core
Check the claims yourself
- Dell’s official release: opensource.dell.com/releases/openpastures/ — published 2016, on Dell’s own site.
- The open-sourced code: github.com/jdattilo/cattle-2.0 (GPL-3.0).
- Company fast facts on our press page; founder track record at josephdattilo.com.
- The service this depth feeds: Managed Software Delivery.
Enterprise-grade discipline, small-team shape.
The same engineering that ran Dell’s test fleets now ships operational software for businesses that outgrew their tools.
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