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 put together featuring myself and San Antonio’s greenery. (See the original article this came from).
Some of topics I tackle:
How Dell’s Data Center Solutions Group is designing servers for high-end cloud computing
How Dell is integrating hardware with software in cloud servers
Coming soon: Dell Cloud Solution for Web Applications/Leveraging Joyent‘s software
Today Rackspace and NASAannounced OpenStack, an open source cloud platform that they are collaborating on and building a community around. Last week the inaugural OpenStack design summit was held here in Austin with 20 companies from around the world, including Dell, participating.
During one of the breaks I grabbed sometime with Rackspace’s cloud president, Lew Moorman to learn more about the effort and get his thoughts:
Some of the topics Lew tackles:
What is OpenStack (an opensource set of technologies for building clouds…)
Why Rackspace decided to opensource their code .
How Rackspace got hooked up with NASA and what each brings to the party.
Taking Nebula’s core foundation and adding some elements from Rackspace’s side in order to put together a release candidate that should be available to the community this Fall.
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.
Last month when I was out in the Bay Area for our launch, I stopped by the offices of salesforce.com. I visited with some folks that I used to work with in a past life and then grabbed some time with Salesforce’s VP of product marketing, Sean Whiteley.
Here is what Sean had to say:
Some of the topics Sean tackles.
The idea behind salesforce.com (SFDC): In 1999 founders Marc Benioff and Parker Harris looked at Amazon and wondered why businesses couldn’t manage and get insight into their customers with the same ease as they interact with their favorite website.
Given that SFDC is built on a model of “multitenancy” how do they address security concerns when they are brought up.
Force.com: what it is and how it came about. Also the advent of AppExchange, where you can shop for applications that let you extend the cloud applications that you use to run your business.
What salesforce.com and Dell are doing together to address small and medium businesses: providing a business in a box, helping organizations focus on their core business rather than IT.
Whether you believe in the Cloud or not, it’s coming. That being said it’s not a phenomenon that will fill skies of IT departments tomorrow, but rather it is starting out as another tool in IT’s bag of tricks. As time passes, cloud computing will increasingly become a greater part of the portfolio of compute models that IT departments manage, sitting alongside Traditional computing and Virtualization.
Cloud Computing Today
If you were to graph the distribution of compute models being used today by IT departments in large enterprises, it would look something like the chart below. Today, traditional computing and virtualization are where most of the distribution lies with a little bit of flirting with the Public Cloud in the case of SaaS applications for areas like HR, CRM, email etc. Private cloud is presently negligible.
Over the next three to five years
Over the next three to five years the above distribution will flatten out and shift to the right and will resemble the graph below. Private cloud will represent the largest compute model utilized but it will be equally flanked by virtualization and public cloud. You’ll notice there will still be a decent amount of resources that remain in the traditional compute bucket representing applications that are not worth the effort of rewriting or converting to a cloud platform.
Evolutionary Vs. Revolutionary
One of the things to note with this new distribution is that the lines between Virtualization and Private Cloud will start to blur (there will also be a blurring between Private and Public clouds as hybrid clouds become more of a reality in the future, but that’s another story for another time). There are two ways to go about setting up private clouds, evolutionary and revolutionary.
Tune in tomorrow and learn more about these two approaches and how they differ. 🙂
My favorite cosmonaut-coder Mark Shuttleworth stopped by our offices this morning for a visit. Mark is the founder of both the Linux distribution Ubuntu and its commercial sponsor Canonical. Mark and I sat down in the lobby and caught up. Here is a short interview we recorded.
The 10.4 Ubuntu release Lucid Lynx and what to expect: a strong cloud focus on the enterprise side and a lot of shiny new bling on the desktop as well as making the desktop “social” (e.g. Tweet straight from your desktop)
What Ubuntu is doing in the Netbook space
What excites Mark the most in technology today and why cloud is like HTTP in the early 90’s
I was recently in Las Vegas for Dell’s annual kick off where the sales force learns all about the cool products we have on tap. Not only were there tons of presentation sessions, there was a full expo area with both Dell and partner booths.
In the Cloud Infrastructure Solutions booth I got to act as the official “ShamWow” guy, giving our pitch (over and over and over).
I must have done the spiel literally 50 times over the three days. But the crowds were great so I wasn’t complaining (much 🙂 ).
The Friday before last my boss Andy and I had a call with James Niccolai of IDG. We chatted about what we’ve been up to at Dell as well as teed up what we have in store for the near distant future.
To get the full scoop you should read the articles but here are some summary bits from the PCworld article:
The DCS [Data Center Solutions] unit was formed about three years ago to help Dell get more business from large Internet firms. Its engineers often spend several weeks on-site with those companies to design low-cost, low-power systems that meet the special requirements of their search, social networking and other Web applications.
That hands-on role means the DCS group designs servers only for large companies, such as Ask.com and Microsoft’s Azure division, which order tens of thousands of servers per year. But that’s about to change, Dell executives said in an interview.
Later this year Dell will turn some of those custom servers into standardized products and sell them to companies that order lower volumes of systems, including enterprises building “private cloud” environments in their data centers, and a second tier of smaller Internet companies.
“What we’ve found is, there are a whole bunch of other customers who want access to those designs but who are not buying in those types of quantities,” said Andy Rhodes, a director with Dell’s DCS group. “So the big thing we’re solving now, and we’ll talk more publically about over the next couple of months, is how to provide more of that capability to many, many more customers.”
There was a good article in Information Week last week with our GM, Forrest Norrod. Forrest talked to Charlie Babcock about the success that Dell’s Data Center Systems unit has had in the cloud space.
You should check out the whole article but here are a few bits I’ve pulled out for your reading pleasure:
Dell’s Data Center Solutions unit, has only 20 customers, but would be the third largest supplier of x86 servers in the U.S. if it were split out from Dell, said Forrest Norrod, the unit’s VP and general manager, in an interview. The only companies ahead it in shipping Intel or AMD servers would be HP and Dell itself.
This foray into cloud computing is somewhat contrary to Dell’s previous pattern of applying sophisticated supply chain logistics to well-worn grooves in the business and consumer computing markets. For one thing, Dell, until recently, hasn’t talked about it. For another, it’s built a business unit that refuses to address the mass market at all.
Norrod acknowledged what other Dell officials said as well: the lessons learned in producing servers for the big Internet service providers will be used when enterprise customers knock on Dell’s door to discuss how to build out their private clouds. “Dell will bring the capabilities from DCS to the mass market,” he said
“Interest [in private cloud computing] is spiking through the roof,” [Norrod] said, and he predicted most new enterprise applications will be designed to run in the cloud, whether public or private. Such applications are built with scalability in mind and can take advantage of the ability of the cloud to generate more virtual machines on demand.
They say turn around is fair play. Kevin Hazard of the Planet recently took this literally. No sooner had I finished interviewing him at the Cloud Expo in Santa Clara then he turned around and pointed his camera at me. He got me talking about the cloud and what the heck Dell’s doing in it.
Some of the topics I tackle:
What I do as Dell’s Cloud Evangelist.
Where Dell plays in the cloud:
Cloud based services providing IT management as a service.
Building these capabilities through the acquisition of four companies over the last two years: MessageOne, ASAP, Everdream and Silverback.
Creating custom servers as well as providing data center design and implementation for some of the world’s largest “hyper-scale” customers e.g. Microsoft’s Azure and three out of the top five search engines in the U.S.
What’s next: building on this experience to offer integrated cloud solutions for setting up private and public clouds. Combining Dell hardware and services with best of breed software — all coming from/supported by Dell.
My thoughts on Public vs. Private clouds and how we will end up with a mix of computing models.
Last Friday I got together with Michael Cote of Red Monk and John Willis of Canonical for a podcast. We met up at a nearby coffee shop and chatted about a whole bunch o’ stuff.
You can listen to the actual podcast on Cote’s blog.
Dell’s cloud building business, focused on a small group of hyper-scale customers (Azure and Facebook being a couple I can name), delivering a high volume of highly customized machines for these customers.
Some of the learnings we’ve gained with working with this group.
Our intent to take this effort to a much wider group of customers and offer complete cloud solutions made up of hardware, third party software, a reference architecture and services.
Last but not least in my series of video’s from last month’s Cloud World/Open Source World I present to you Ken Oestreich, VP of Product marketing at Egenera. I grabbed some time with Ken to learn about Engenera, the cloud and how they’re working with Dell.
Some of the topics that Ken tackles:
While a hypervisor abstracts software, Egenera’s PAN manager abstracts the “plumbing” e.g. NIC cards, switches, host bus adaptor cards etc.
PAN manager allows you to consolidate networks, fail-over entire machines and, in the case of disaster recovery, recover and reproduce entire compute environments.
Egenera is working with Dell in the form of the Dell PAN system to provide agility in your infrastructure.
This Infrastructure as a Service system can be used inside or outside your firewall.
What developments Ken is most excited about in the upcoming year.
The article which supplies short profiles of 85 cloud players, isn’t wishy-washy about what it believes is the inevitability of the cloud model. While it feels there will both a backlash against cloud-mania as well as a well publicized disaster the article states:
Still, the bad news won’t kill the cloud. We can’t ever go back to enclosed datacenters. The cloud is simply easier, faster and more flexible.
“Who says Dell is just a hardware firm?”
Dell comes in at number 10 on the list of the fab 85. One of the big focuses of the Dell section is Dell’s Datacenter Solutions Group (which I am a part of):
…the company launched DCS – Data Center Solutions – to target an audience of businesses that need help configuring a cloud-based datacenter. DCS handles everything from optimization to project management to global consulting. Who says Dell is just a hardware firm? Referring to DCS, Dell CEO Michael Dell toldBusinessweek in 2008 that, “We created a whole new business just to build custom products for those customers. Now it’s a several-hundred-million-dollar business, and it will be a billion-dollar business in a couple of years—it’s on a tear.”
It also keys in on some of Dell’s recent acquisitions in this space:
Dell has made a number of acquisitions to build out the software side of its cloud offering, including Everdream (desktop management software), Silverback Technologies (remote monitoring) and Message One (email management). The goal, it appears: provide one-stop shopping for businesses that want to build an automated datacenter running commodity boxes, all optimized for the cloud. That is likely a lucrative strategy.
If they think this is cool stuff, wait until they see what we have planned 🙂
The opening day keynote was provided by Dell. In all honesty, it wasn’t our best effort. It was particularly tricky since the speaker who was supposed to deliver the presentation had a medical emergency and Judy Chavis, director for business development and global alliances at Dell had to step up and pinch hit at the 11th hour. Here are two pieces written about the keynote, one more positive than the other.
Chinatown, Clouds and Cable Car
Not exactly jam packed
I’ve been to Linux World a couple of times before and this year’s show, despite the amalgamation, was much smaller. Those who came to talk to customers or generate leads must have been dissapointed since there seemed to be hardly any around. That being said, I found it a great event to network and talk to various cloud players in the industry. I was even able to record nine video podcasts that I will be posting over the next few weeks.
Coming attractions
So stay tuned for conversations with the following folks:
Brian Aker — Lead architect for Drizzle
James Urquhart — Big cloud thinker from Cisco
Michael Crandell — CEO of Right Scale
Ken Oestreich — VP of product marketing at Egenera
John Keagy — CEO of GoGrid
James Staten — Analyst covering cloud computing at Forrester
Luke Kanies — Founder of Reductive Labs, maker of Puppet
This afternoon I finished my first week at Dell. Needless to say it was a bit of whirlwind, but hey, I haven’t quit yet :).
I spent the week trying to get set up — fighting with printers, getting used to Microsoft Vista, figuring out how to put my laptop to sleep etc. — as well as meeting with a slew of people who I will be working with going forward.
On Day 2 the Datacenter Solutions group, which I’m a part of, had their second half of the year kick-off. It was a good opportunity to see where the group has come from and where they’re going. This team has done/is doing some pretty impressive things with some of the world’s most humongous cloud providers.
My cube at the end of Day 1. No phone but a laptop and monitor.
The folks I met with were both within and outside the Datacenter team. Outside of the Datacenter folks, I met with analyst relations, PR, members of Dell’s social media team, a former Sun compadre and even randomly ran into and had lunch with a neighbor. I’ve been very impressed with how friendly and nice everyone’s been. It will take a little while to learn the subtleties of the culture but it seems to be pretty WYSIWYG.
Parmer 2, the building I work in. (Note the clouds. Coincidence? I think not)
Next week I’m in the office on Monday and then off with the Datacenter Solutions chief architect and a few people from Dell’s open source team to Cloud World/Open Source World/Next Generation Datacenter in San Francisco (the event formally known as Linux World). Dell has a keynote as well as a couple of talks and a booth. It will be a good opportunity for me to learn more about what Dell’s doing in the space as well as meeting with folks in the industry in my new role as Cloud Evangelist.
Let the wild rumpus start.
Building 1 on the Round Rock campus.
One of the call centers for customer support.
Teammate Drew, patent holder and product planner, who has the good fortune of sitting across the aisle from me.
Monday morning I’m starting a new gig. I will be joining Dell as their cloud computing evangelist.
So what’s that mean?
As the cloud computing evangelist I will act as Dell’s ambassador to the cloud computing community (not sure if the sash is provided or if I have to supply my own). I will also work with analysts and press and be responsible for messaging as well as Dell’s cloud blog.
Dell, who provides the infrastructure for the major cloud players from Google to Amazon to Salesforce, is about to kick their cloud computing effort up a notch and Im very glad to be part of the team!
When I attended the RackSpace Customer event back at the end of September I was impressed with the talk that Paul Bell of Dell gave (Paul reports to CEO Michael Dell and is responsible for all business operations for Dell in North and South America).
Dell and the Cloud(s) (sources: my hand + the football Dell gave out at the conference + Friday’s sunset)
In his keynote Paul talked about Cloud Computing and the challenges the economy was presenting Dell and its customers. I caught Paul after his talk (BTW Lombardi is a Dell customer and Dell is a Lombardi Teamworks customer) and asked if I could tape a podcast with him. He graciously agreed and here’s the result that I recorded at the beginning of last week.
The key Cloud characteristics: Speed to deployment and ease of turning on/off
The need to separate the “real” from the fictitious when it comes to the Cloud
The interest Paul is seeing in the Cloud from smaller companies
Two of the biggest ways Dells plays in the cloud 1) supplier of infrastructure 2) deliverer of IT as a service
How on one hand the tough economy is driving interest in utilizing the cloud while at the same time it is causing a slow down in the sales of cloud infrastructure
The economy (starts ~7:30): Looking back at what happened in 2001 and trying to gain insight
How the economic malaise that hit North America has finally caught up with South America
How Dell is planning to help customers during these tough times.
Posted by Barton George 
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