Sun’s Champagne Super Nova

January 31, 2010

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.

Aloha Stanford University Network, 1982-2010

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Cast Iron: Integrating Cloud & on-premise Apps

January 30, 2010

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.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

InfoWeek: Dell DCS unit racking up cloud sales

January 18, 2010

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.

Stay tuned for more :)

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Talking to the Head of VMware’s Cloud Business

January 7, 2010

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.

At last month’s Gartner’s Data Center conference, right after his standing room only presentation, I grabbed some time with VMware’s Mr. Cloud, Dan Chu .  Hear what he had to say:

Some of the topics Dan tackles:

  • 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.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Microsoft, Virtualization and the Cloud

January 4, 2010

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.

Extra credit viewing:

Stay tuned next time for Dan Chu of VMware to hear what they are up to.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

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