Dell’s Data Center Solutions group (DCS) is no longer a toddler. Over the weekend we turned four! Four years ago on March 27, 2007 Dell announced the formation of the Data Center Solutions group, a special crack team designed to service the needs of hyperscale customers. On that day eWeek announced the event in their…
This week, outside of Frankfurt, WorldHostingDays is taking place. A whole delegation of folks from the Data Center Solutions group is there to support the announcement of our new microserver line. A lot of our key partners are there as well. One such partner is AMD. Earlier today, AMD director of product marketing John Fruehe…
Monday I wrote about the announcement of our mega-beefy, 96-core PowerEdge C6145 server, specifically geared to customers solving big problems involving huge and complex data sets in mapping, visualization, simulations and rendering. At the other end of the spectrum however are customers, such as those offering low-end dedicated hosting solutions, who are looking for systems…
Last November, Dell announced the Dell Cloud Solution for Web Applications. This turnkey offering is composed of Dell systems and Joyent Software along with a reference architecture all supported by Dell services. This solution enables a private Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment to support the development and testing of languages such as PHP, Perl,…
A while ago, as a follow-up to our white paper “Laying the Groundwork for Private and Public Clouds” Dell and Intel worked with CIO magazine to put together a Tech Dossier that picked up where our previous paper left off. “A Revolutionary Approach to Cloud Building” consists of an upfront white paper and four related…
Earlier this month an interview I did with Robert Duffner, Director of Product management for Windows Azure, went live on the Windows Azure team blog. Robert asked me a variety of questions about Cloud security, how I see the Cloud evolving, the pitfalls of the cloud, where Dell plays etc. I was pleasantly surprised to…
Dell’s Data Center Solutions (DCS) group focuses on customers operating huge scaled out environments. Given the number of systems deployed in these environments we are always looking for ways to take energy out of our systems. A half a watt here, a half a watt there means big energy savings when multiplied across a hyper…
One of the featured speakers during the kick off of the OpenStack design summit yesterday was NASA CTO of IT, Chris Kemp. OpenStack is an open source cloud platform and the compute side of the project is based on code from NASA’s Nebula cloud. I got some time with Chris and learned about NASA’s involvement…
Yesterday morning I made the drive down to San Antonio for OpenStack’s second design summit (and first open to the public). If you’re not familiar with OpenStack, its an open source cloud platform founded on contributed code from Rackspace and NASA’s Nebula cloud. The project was kicked off back in July at an inaugural design…
Ironically when Dell, the company that built its success around supply chain management excellence, started the Data Center Solutions group to serve the “biggest of the big,” supply chain and procurement were just bit players. I recently sat down with Chris Thompson who heads up the DCS supply chain and procurement organization and learned how…
In my last entry I talked about how Steve Perlman, CEO and founder of OnLive joined the recent press round table we had in New York. OnLive is a cloud-based gaming company that launched earlier this year and whose servers were custom built by Dell’s Data Center Solution (DCS) group. To give you a bit…
Timothy Prickett Morgan of everyone’s favorite vulture-branded media site The Register attended a round table discussion we held a few weeks ago in New York. His piece from that event, which was focused around the cloud, was posted yesterday. You should check out the whole article but here are some snippets to whet your appetite:…
Last week a couple of us went down to San Antonio to help represent the OpenStack project at Rackspace’s partner summit. While there I met up with the VAR Guy. Mr. Guy got me chatting about Dell’s Data Center Solutions group, where we’ve been and where we’re going. Below is the resulting video he…
One of the key ingredients for the success of any open source project is a strong community manager. Coming on board to fill that role for the not-quite three-month-old OpenStack project is Stephen Spector. (If you’re not familiar with OpenStack, it’s an open source cloud platform). Stephen made his first public appearance in his new…
A couple of days ago Bret Piatt, who handles Technical Alliances for OpenStack, came up to Austin to have further discussion with our team’s software engineers around OpenStack. If you’re not familiar with OpenStack, it is an open source cloud platform founded on contributed code from Rackspace and NASA’s Nebula cloud. The project was kicked…
iland is a provider of cloud computing infrastructure with high-availability data centers specifically designed for cloud computing in Boston, Washington D.C., Houston, Los Angeles, Dallas, and London. To stay competitive in the cloud infrastructure business, iland needs to gain as much value as possible from every watt of power and every square foot of data…
A couple of weeks ago a group from salesforce.com paid a visit to Dell. Among other things, they came to discuss their new product “Chatter” that Dell has recently launched internally and who’s virtues Michael Dell has tweeted. Among the salesforce crew was Sean Whiteley, VP of product marketing. I was able to get some…
J.P. Rangaswamy is British Telecom’s chief scientist and a very interesting fellow. At the Cloud Summit at OSCON last month he delivered a talk on the future of the cloud. I was quite intrigued so I grabbed him during the break to learn a bit more about a few of the concepts he presented. Some…
The week before last our team decided to divide and conquer to cover two simultaneous events. Half of us headed to Portland, Oregon for OSCON and the other half stayed here in Austin to participate in hostingcon. The Hostingcon keynote Among those participating in hostingcon was my boss Andy Rhodes who gave the keynote on…
At OSCON last week I ran into a compadre from a previous life, Fred Kohout. Fred is now the CMO at UC4, a pure play software automation company, and he, like I, was in Portland to attend OSCON and the Cloud Summit. At the summit Fred did to me what I’ve done to so many…