Six years ago today the first Project Sputnik system appeared on dell.com. It all started at the beginning of 2012 with a pitch to an internal innovation committee. A month after the pitch, on the ides of March, the committee gave the go ahead for an exploratory project to test out the idea of a…
Here is our third and final post walking through the setting up of the Joyent Triton platform in the Dell CTO lab. In the first post, Don Walker of the CTO office gave an overview of what we were doing and why. The second laid out the actual components and configuration of the platform. Today’s video…
Continuing from the previous post, here is a more detailed explanation of the Joyent Triton platform we set up in the CTO lab. Triton is Joyent’s elastic container infrastructure that runs on their cloud, a private cloud or both. The idea behind setting up this instance is, working with Joyent, to learn about the platform. The next step…
A while back I tweeted how we had begun setting up a mini-instance of Joyent’s Triton in our Dell CTO lab. Triton is Joyent’s elastic container infrastructure that runs on their cloud, a private cloud or both. This cloud platform includes OS and machine virtualization (e.g. Docker with regards to the former and typical VMs under KVM…
As Dell as a company continues to evolve we have started implementing DevOps practices in our software development. Dell IT is employing DevOps as are some of our product development teams. In the following video, systems engineer Chris Gully explains how Dell’s Active System Manager has incorporated DevOps into its development. (the audio could be a…
The other day Canonical came to Dell for a show and tell. The Sputnik team, normally located in various buildings in Austin and Round Rock, all found ourselves in attendance at the event. Here is a quick meet-the-team video introducing ourselves, saying where we’re from and declaring our favorite TV show. Additionally, here is a short case…
Here is the second in a series of four blog entries focusing on Dell’s Internet of Things lab in Santa Clara, California. Following the overall overview in the last entry, today’s post focuses on the customers who utilize the IoT laboratory. Product Technologist, Raja Tamilarasan explains how customers of all sizes, from small start-ups to…
This is the final video clip from the Dell Services Application think tank held earlier this year. Today’s clip features the always enlightening and entertaining Jimmy Pike. Jimmy, who is a Senior Fellow at Dell and was once called the Willy Wonka of servers, was one of the 10 panelists at the Think Tank where we discussed the challenges of…
This morning a group of us here at Dell met with Ben Golub, Jerome Petazzoni and Nick Stinemates of dotCloud, the company behind the wildly popular open source project, Docker, “the Linux container engine.” They came to sample the great barbecue and to chat about how Docker might potentially work with Project Sputnik, the Crowbar Project…
A couple of weeks ago we announced a Beta program for the four-month old Project Sputnik — an effort to investigate creating a developer focused laptop based on Ubuntu and Dell’s XPS13 laptop. Since the beta announcement we have received thousands of applications from around the world. This tremendous response, on top of fantastic amount…
In a recent post that highlighted the demise of the midrange server market, Timothy Prickett Morgan talked about the new server classification that IDC has just started tracking, “Density-optimized”: These are minimalist server designs that resemble blades in that they have skinny form factors but they take out all the extra stuff that hyperscale Web…
During SXSW Michael Cote and I, on behalf of Dell, organized a series of mini meet-ups focusing on developers, tech and social media folks. The second event we held was on Saturday on the top level of Speakeasy. Being Saturday night, this turned out to be the biggest of the three get togethers. Here is…
Before the holidays I posted the first of three videos that Dell and Intel put together around cloud computing. These videos are part of a larger series around key topics like IT reinvention, the consumerization of IT, social media etc. This second video features myself, Dell’s VP of Platform marketing Sally Stevens and John Pereira,…
One of the interviews I did at Dell World was a video with IT in Canada. I did the video with Paul Cooper, Dell’s country manager for Canada. In the first half of the video I talk about how Dell got into the cloud and where we play in the space. In the second half…
A few weeks ago Michael Cote joined Dell from the excellent analyst firm, Redmonk which focuses on software and developers. Cote who spent five plus years with Redmonk has joined Dell in our corporate strategy group, focusing on software. I for one am very glad he’s here and feel that he’s joined at the right…
Back in April, Dell announced that it was making a billion dollar investment to further drive its evolution from a systems to a services company. Specifically we talked about delivering a raft of new solutions, launching 10 cloud data centers around the world and building out a global network of solutions centers. The solution centers…
Today at Citrix Synergy, Citrix announced “Project Olympus,” their up coming OpenStack distribution. In case you’re not familiar with it, OpenStack is an open source cloud platform based on the code from NASA’s Nebula cloud as well as Rackspace’s storage code. The OpenStack project kicked of last summer and already has gathered support from over…
As a run up to next months Structure conference, GigaOm has put together a list of the top 50 companies “that are influencing how the cloud and infrastructure evolves.” Those who made the list, entitled The Structure 50, are described as follows These are the ones to watch — at least in 2011. You’ve heard of…
Yesterday was day two of Dell’s two-day industry analyst summit which was held at the W hotel in Austin Texas. The event brought together over 100 analysts from around the world to hear to about the company’s strategy and vision from Dell’s top execs. The second day kicked off with a presentation by the President…
Today at the W hotel in Austin, Dell held its bi-annual analyst summit. Today’s event is the third in a series of analyst functions organized around the theme “Services and Solutions for the Virtual Era.” The first event was held in San Francisco in March of last year and the second came six months later…