Several months ago in the press release that announced our Cloud Solution offerings, there was a particularly cloudy paragraph that talked about Dell’s relationship with Microsoft. The paragraph ended with the sentence: “Dell and Microsoft will collaborate on the Windows Azure platform, with Dell and Microsoft offering services, and Microsoft continuing to invest in Dell hardware for Windows Azure infrastructure.” What the heck did that mean? Well today we can be a bit clearer.
Dell Cloud based on Windows Azure
Earlier this morning at Microsoft’s Worldwide partner conference, the giant of Redmond announced the limited production release of the Windows Azure technology for a select few tech giants. Dell is one of these and will be taking this technology and creating ourselves a Platform as a service (PaaS) cloud. We will in turn use this cloud to deliver both public and private cloud services to customers looking to develop and deliver next generation cloud services based on .Net. This platform will be targeted at enterprise, public, small and medium-sized business customers as well as be used by Dell itself.
But wait, there’s more: Azure in a box
Dell and Microsoft are also working on a Dell-powered Windows Azure platform appliance. (Don’t let the term “appliance” throw you, you can’t register for this and it really represents 100s or 1000s of servers plus storage and networking). Dell will be making this turnkey cloud platform available to enterprises to enable them to set up their own PaaS clouds within their organizations. Dell has a bit of a leg up here since we’ve been working with Microsoft on Azure as the primary infrastructure partner since its launch back in ’08. We’re simply packaging this “winning combination” and providing it in a turnkey package for internal use by enterprises.
A little context: adding to our cloud portfolio
So how does this fit in with some of the other cloud solutions that we have announced? At a high-level, Dell is providing cloud solutions to help customers take either an evolutionary approach that makes their existing applications more efficient or a revolutionary approach with new applications written for cloud scale (we actually believe customers will do both).
We have already been working with Microsoft to offer evolutionary cloud services based on Microsoft’s Hyper V platform. We are now complementing this with a revolutionary Windows Azure appliance. This turnkey PaaS cloud platform will be in addition to the turnkey PaaS cloud platform that we announced with Joyent. Whereas the Joyent-based offering, “the Dell cloud solution for web applications” is targeted at folks developing in Java, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails etc. the Azure appliance will naturally be targeted at the .Net world. BTW we also offer solutions based on VMware Redwood/ Spring, EMC Atmos and BMC among others.
Stay tuned for more!
Extra-credit reading
- Press release: Dell Expands Cloud Strategy and Services With Microsoft Windows Azure Platform Appliance
- The Register: Why Microsoft took its cloud Private
Pau for now…
Barton's Blog 
[…] on the Dell/Azure announcement Monday, as part of Microsoft’s big Azure announcement, we announced that we would be both building an Azure appliance, enabling customers to build their own public or […]
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