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.”
Coincidentally, the acquisitions of the last two companies I worked at both closed this week. The first is Sun Microsystems where I worked from 1995 to 2008 and which was purchased by Oracle. The second is Lombardi which I left at the end of last summer and which was acquired by IBM.
Two very different acquisitions. One a Silicon Valley trailblazer whose acquisition took 9 torturous months to close, the other a star in the focused field of business process management which closed in less than six weeks. One company on the way up, one an icon on the way down.
Farewell Sun
While I wish the employees of both the best of luck, I particularly mourn the loss of Sun. It was an amazing company to have worked at. I joined the month that Java was introduced and rode it through its dot.com dominance and then down the other side. Even when its economic dominance waned, its willingness to take risk such as its refocusing on open source made it a fascinating place to be. The tech industry will be a less interesting place now that it is gone.
I take heart in the fact that the Sun diaspora now outweighs those still employed there. Sun alums can be found across the industry at companies big and small around the world (in fact there is a hearty band of us here at Dell). While there is no more Sun “the company” there are thousands of bits of it scattered throughout the high-tech landscape.
One of the trickiest parts for SMB’s (or organizations of any size) who are utilizing cloud-based applications is integrating these apps with exisiting on-premise applications. That’s where Cast Iron Systems, comes in.
Last month Chandar Pattabhiram, VP of Product & Channel marketing at Cast Iron visited Dell. I met up with him to chat about the company and learn what they are up to.
Some of the topics Chandar tackles:
Cast Iron is the leader in connecting cloud-based applications with on premise enterprise apps (eg Oracle, SAP).
The company began by offering a pre-configured integration appliance. They have since expand and now also offer a virtual integration appliance as well as the Cast Iron Cloud (integration as a service).
While their focus is on SaaS, they are partnering with leaders in each layer of the cloud to integrate cloud offerings with on premise apps:
SaaS: SalesForce, ADP
PaaS: Google, Force.com, Azure
IaaS: Dell
Cast Iron’s goal is to evolve to be the enterprise cloud integration platform, bridging the world of public, private and on premise applications.
Cast Iron provides the software underpinning Dell Integration Services. These services allow SalesForce.com customers to extract data that has been locked in on premise apps and provides centralized visibility within SalesForce.com.
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.
Here is the second in my three part series on Virtualization and the cloud. Today’s entry focuses on the 800 pound gorilla in the virtualization space, VMware.
What VMware is seeing customers actually doing to take advantage of the cloud today both with regards to public and private clouds.
Some polling data he collected during his talk based on the ~300 folks who attended: 90-95% were virtualizing, 15% had an active private cloud project, 5-10% had a public cloud project. (This is pretty representative of what Dan’s generally seeing.)
The three phases of cloud:
Phase I: Standardizing and virtualizing an environment.
Phase II: Adopting private cloud from a management stand point: getting to self service and automation in terms of provisioning a new service/collapsing the time it takes to get a new image out to an end user or developer from weeks to minutes/ implementing charge back, dynamic capacity planning and management.
Phase III: Thinking about or planning how to leverage the public cloud in a fully compatible way.
A short history of VMware: how they’ve moved from desktop and server virtualization to VM management and optimization to enabling their platform for private clouds and public cloud providers.
Their “recent” acquisition of Spring Source and how it fits in.
Stay tuned next time for a summary of Gartner’s virtualization presentation from their data center conference.
Happy New Year to all! For the first week of this new year I’m going to focus on virtualization and the cloud.
Kicking off this mini-series is an interview I did last month at the Gartner DataCenter conference with David Greschler, director of virtualization strategy at Microsoft. I caught up with David right after his talk at the conference.
Some of the topics David tackles:
The ability to treat IT as a service. Before virtualization, specific workloads were tied to specific devices. Thanks to virtualization you can create pooled resources which is the beginning of IT as a service.
Microsoft’s Dynamic Data Center Toolkit: This tool overlays on top of HyperV and System Center (their management tool) and allows you to look at and manage your own datacenter as a pool of compute power. It is a step towards the private cloud and can also be used by hosters. It will also allow for moving workloads between public and private clouds.
Microsoft is focusing on giving you knowledge at the app level. System Center tells you whats going on inside not just at the hypervisor level.
Windows Azure: a large scale cloud that you can use to build apps for and have hosted on this environment.
The ability also to take workloads into Azure over time.
Image based Management: Taking the technology of the desktop-targeted App V and applying it to the server. Will allow you to encapsulate apps and move them from one OS to another without having to re-install them. You will no longer have 1000s and 1000s of virtualized images that you will have to manage and monitor, instead you will very few golden images of these VMs and you will be able to simply put these workloads in and take them out.
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 month at the Interop/Web 2.0 I was able to drag Citrix’s Roger Klorese away from booth duty for an interview. Roger is a Sr. Director at Citrix who works on Xen server and the Essentials product family. Here is what he had to say:
Some of the topics Roger tackles
What Roger has been focusing on this year — Free Xen server. Launching the offering (there have been 200K downloads this year)and then bringing more features into it. What comes with it for free and what are add-ons that you get thru the Essentials family.
In the networking space Citrix announced a version of their netscaler app delivery server as a virtual appliance.
Managing “OPVs” (other people’s VM’s)
What Roger is most excited about:
Growing the datacenter into the cloud – Xen.org recently released the Xen cloud platform which is a full cloud distro, with a management stack based on open sourcing the Xen server stack.
Early next year they are releasing the Xen client type 1, a bare metal client hypervisor.
A couple of weeks ago I was in New York to visit customers and attend the co-located Interop and Web 2.0 events. One of the attendees/participants I got to know there was Joe Weinman, VP of ATT’s Business Solutions. Joe has been focusing a lot on the cloud lately so I thought I’d put down for posterity his thoughts and explanation of what ATT is up to in this space.
Some of the topics that Joe tackles:
ATT’s evolving strategy involves mix of managed endpoints and a variety of network services as well as a variety of services in the cloud.
ATT’s services range from infrastructure services like “Synaptic hosting,” storage as a service and compute as a service thru a variety of SaaS apps like unified comms and collaboration, SAP, Oracle ebiz suite, Seybold and JD Edwards.
They have a large platform as a service offering that is used by tens of thousands developers creating at mobile enterprise apps.
They target a wide variety of endpoints e.g. iphones,windows mobile devices, netbooks, black berries all the way thru tele-presence rooms.
How ATT delivers on both front end and back end architectures.
Last but not least from the videos I took last month at Cloud Expo is the interview I conducted with Barry Lynn of 3tera. At a high level Barry positions his company as a software company that offers a turnkey cloud platform. See what else he has to say:
Some of the topics Barry Tackles
3tera sell’s their flagship product AppLogic three ways
License it to people who want to run private clouds behind their firewalls [competitors: VMware, people building it themselves]
License it to service providers who want to offer public cloud services but don’t want to build their own cloud (there are 30 SP’s worldwide offering clouds on the 3Tera platform) e.g. KDDI [competitors: people who build it themselves]
Virtual private data center business where people can lease a data center. They do this with DC partners [competitors: any service provider]
What they are doing with KDDI and their “KDDI cloud server” (hint: they are provisioning stacks e.g. ruby, .net, java…)
What’s coming up
Their App store is in beta and will be in production in Q1 of next year (ISVs publishing to the 3tera cloud).
Cloudware release: their orchestration and management layer will be offered separately next year and can be used on top of anyone’s virtualization, computing fabric or cloud engine.
I first met Dave Nielsen when I attended the Austin Cloud Camp back in April of this year. I bumped into to him again at the cloud computing expo in Santa Clara at the beginning of last month. He was putting on another cloud camp and checking out the expo. I sat down with him and got him to tell me all about the phenomenon that has become cloud camp.
Some of the topics Dave tackles:
Cloud Camp’s un-conference format and how attendees drive the agenda and topics.
Where Dave got the idea and what his background is.
How it all began back in June of ‘08 with the first cloud camp in San Francisco and then quickly jumped across the pond and then back to the Windy City. (There have been 50 cloud camps in 16 monts, half in the US and the other half in Europe and Asia)
Every city is different. To help the cities less familiar with the un-conference format, an “un-panel” was added.
I’m currently here in Las Vegas attending Gartner’s Data Center conference. It’s day two and I’ve been very impressed with the quality of the sessions so far. In particular I thought yesterday’s keynote was very good and I wanted to share my notes from the talk.
The presentation was entitled, “Infrastructure and Operations: Charting a course for the coming decade” and was delivered by David Cappuccio. In his talk, David walked us through the “10 Trends to watch carefully.”
Last week I headed out to the Big Apple to attend Interop/Web 2.0 and present Dell’s cloud vision/strategy to customers. I was also able to grab several interviews at the co-located shows.
I’ve posted the first video featuring Azure evangelist Keith Pijanowski but have a couple more coming up: Roger Klose, Sr Director of Citrix’s Datacenter & Cloud Division and Joe Weinman, VP of ATT’s Business Solutions. Joe also moderated a panel that my boss, Andy Rhodes was on: Never Buy a Server Again: Should You Move Everything to On-Demand? (Here’s a write up on the panel that appeared on zdnet.)
I decided to walk the 20 blocks from Penn station to my hotel. It was a fantastic night, Times Square was alive and I even stopped for a slice.
Interop/Web 2.0 were held in everyone's favorite, the Javits Convention center
The Network is dead, long live the Network. Art installation on the show floor.
At the cloud expo in Santa Clara earlier this month I ran into Rick German, CEO of Stoneware, Inc. I had previously heard of Stoneware since they are partnering with Dell on a cloud offering for education but I knew that was just one area in which they played. I sat down with Rick and learned about all they did.
Some of the topics Rick tackles:
Helping customers to build their own private clouds within their data centers and enabling them to plug in their own windows and webhosted apps (plugging public cloud apps into the data center). Taking orgs from client-centric to web-centric.
Delivery via a virtual web desktop accessed from a plethora of browsers: Firefox, IE, Chrome, Opera and Safari.
Stoneware’s 10-year history and how the advent of “cloud-o-mania” has helped or hurt them.
What to look for from Stoneware in the year ahead.
I’m currently in New York visiting customers and attending Interop/ Web 2.0. While these two conferences have different session tracks their expos are co-located and attendees of either can visit the whole lot. It was then in the Web 2.0 section earlier today where I met Keith Pijanowski, a Microsoft evangelist for Windows Azure.
Keith has been working with Azure the last year and half and telling customers how it can drive down costs and make their software development cycle more agile. I got Keith to take a quick break from booth duty and explain it to me. (I wanted to know what all those Dell servers were powering
Some of the topics Keith tackles
How it works: You develop on premise (the cloud environment is emulated on the developer’s desktop) and then upload your code to the cloud where you have all the services, resources and compute power needed to run your app. You then manage all your code and storage areas via a portal.
Azure is ready to use but Microsoft wont charge for another 2 mos. The last free month the customer will get a bill of what it would cost if they had had to pay.
What’s coming to Azure in the future, some examples:
Right now you have SQL Azure database in the cloud but they will build out the SQL Azure brand so that it has many of the same capabilities that customers are used to on premise.
When .net 4.0 becomes available they will have a work flow service
Will have synchronization services (SQL Azure sync) so customers can have a database in the cloud and one on premise and sync them.
With today’s post, I’m right at the mid-point of my series of video interviews from Cloud Computing Expo. Today’s post offers a two-for-one special, Gluster CEO Hitesh Chellani along with Jack O’Brien who heads Gluster’s product management.
Some of the topics Hitesh and Jack tackle:
Gluster as a general-purpose open source cluster platform that runs on top of commodity hardware like Dell.
Their goal to transform the storage market the way Red Hat transformed the server market (Gluster employs a subscription model just like Red Hat).
What would you do after spending time at Lawrence Livermore National Labs putting together the second fastest super computer in the world? Hitesh thought he’d distill the experience and apply it to the storage space.
Some of the performance-driven verticals Gluster started out in.
The new hot area of virtual storage next to virtual servers.
A couple of weeks ago on the show floor of Cloud Computing Expo in Santa Clara I ran into Adam Hawley, Director of product management for Oracle VM. When Adam finished his stint in the Oracle booth he sat down with me to talk about what was going on at Oracle in the world of virtualization and the cloud.
Some of the topics Adam tackles:
Oracle VM, Oracle’s sever virtualization and management platform, while based on Xen is all Oracle on top of it.
The Virtual Iron acquisition which is in the process of being incorporated within the Oracle portfolio and is slated for release in 2010.
The Cloud as a higher level of automation on top of virtualization, compared to what traditional virtualization has provided.
Where Oracle will play in the cloud space (hint: think private).
The Oracle assembly builder that Adam was showing off at the show.
Given Larry’s views on cloud computing, is “cloud” a dirty word at Oracle?
At the cloud computing expo in Santa Clara last week I was able to grab some time with Rob Walters, director of product management at Houston-based The Planet. Rob, who has an atypical Texas twang, talked to me about how The Planet has been dipping its toe in the cloud waters and how it is soon planning on taking the plunge.
Some of the topics Rob tackles:
The Planet began its foray into cloud computing over a year ago by partnering with Nirvanix and providing a storage cloud for back-up and archive.
They have spent the last 9 months working on a cloud compute offering which will launch in Q1.
The Planet will look to offer the cloud capabilities to their dedicated hosting customers. They will use the concept of virtualization which these customers understand and appreciate to create an understanding of the cloud, a concept that these customers are still a little leery of.
Kicking off my series of videos from last week’s Cloud Expo in Santa Clara, here is a chat I had with Oren Teich, of Heroku. Heroku, if you’re not familiar is a 2-yr old Platform as-a-Service company targeting Ruby developers. Oren recently joined Heroku as their head of product management and had the following to say:
Some of the topics Oren tackles:
Where the name “Heroku” comes from and why they were going for a Japanese sounding name.
Why did they choose Ruby and why did they go with a cloud-based plaform?
How Heroku is similar/different from Google App Engine and Engine Yard.
The majority of the folks who have created the 39,000+ apps on the site are hobbists. That being said, the folks who pay their bills are those who are creating social media apps for platforms like Facebook, Twitter and the iPhone.
How Heroku makes their money: they charge as you scale and they charge for add-ons.
What they plan to concentrate on in the year ahead
This week I made the trek out of the Lone Star state and headed west to the Bay Area. I spent the first day in San Francisco where I took our sales folks through my cloud presentation and then had meetings with a few members of the press. Here is the outcome of a couple of those meetings:
From the city I headed down to Santa Clara and the Cloud Computing Expo. I don’t think I saw a single customer at the event but I did run into a bunch of interesting companies in attendance. With my trusty Flip Mino I even recorded a bunch of interviews that I will be rolling out in the days to come. Here’s the list
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.
Posted by Barton George 
