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.
As part of the Cloud ISV partner program we announced last month, we are working with “big data” player Aster Data. When I was out for our launch a few weeks back, I met up with Mayank Bawa, CEO and co-founder of Aster Data. We got together in my hotel lobby and talked about Aster Data, how it came to be, how they tackle Big Data analysis and how Dell and Aster are working together. Check it out:
Some of the topics Mayank tackles.
How Aster came to be: came out of the research Mayank and his co-founders were doing at Standford. They even got seed funding from their professor who had also Google and VMware get their starts when they were projects at Stanford.
Aster’s approach: build a data infrastructure that can not only store large amounts of data but also has enough compute power to analyze that data.
Tying Map Reduce closely to SQL to produce a language called SQL map reduce. This allows apps to be run right where the data is stored and managed. The Map Reduce framework allows to apps to be expressed in a variety of languages e.g. Java, Perl, Python, C++.
How Aster and Dell are working together: Bringing a MPP (massive parallel processing) data warehouse infrastructure to their customers. Building one blueprint so customers can create a self service data warehouse and another to set up infrastructure for big data analytics.
Last but not least in our tour of the first flight of servers in Dell’s PowerEdge C line is the C2100. This was filmed last month at our launch right after we closed down our whisper suite. Click below and join solutions architect Rafael Zamora as he leads you through the thrills, chills and spills of this cool new machine.
Spoiler Alert! A few Highlights
This machine is a great high performance data analytics and cloud optimized storage server. It’s perfect for use in conjunction with software from our Cloud ISV partners Joyent, Aster Data, Canonical or Greenplum.
The entire front can be jam-packed with disk drives for mega storage. You can get up to 24TB by loading twelve 3.5inch 2TB drives.
While the C2100 has same system board as the C1100, it comes with twice the real estate in a 2U form factor.
There’s even a platform for two additional drives that you can use for a bunch of different purposes such as separating production and non-production traffic.
Last month when I was out in the Bay Area for our launch, I was able to catch up with Rich Wolski, founder and CTO of Eucalyptus. Eucalyptus is one of the key ingredients in the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud that is being certified to run on Dell’s PowerEdge C systems as part of our cloud ISV program. Here is what Rich had to say:
Some of the topics Rich tackles:
How Eucalyptus started at the University of California at Santa Barbara. They wanted to show how old-style large scale computing (NSF super computer centers) could be combined with new large-scale computing (in the form of Amazon) in the service of science. Wanted to also include 4-6 university data centers.
They put the code out as open source and got deluged by science and commercial industry about potential applications. Grew too big to continue as a research project so they brought it outside.
Working with Canonical and Ubuntu and how the relationship began. UEC and what part Eucalyptus makes up.
How NASA is offering a production Eucalyptus cloud to NASA researchers and other governmental agencies.
Where Rich sees Eucalyptus going in the next two years. The importance of the open source community and their continued focus on private clouds in the enterprise.
As part of the CIO series we are doing with Information Week, I did a webinar on Wednesday called The Journey to the Cloud. If you want to get a feel for some of the big issues and ideas addressed during the webinar, check out moderator Fred Paul’s entertaining blog entry. Here is the deck I used:
If you’re interested in listening to the webinar you can get access to it here (you will need to register). I spent about 20 minutes on the presentation and 30 minutes fielding questions from the audience. One question submitted that we didn’t have time to answer was why Fred Paul and I both have first names for last names. That will have to wait for another webinar.
Our first Cloud white paper is now available and I’m really happy with the way it turned out. Being relatively new to Dell I didn’t know if I would be “compelled” to mention product in it or not but I’m happy to say that the paper focuses solely on the trends behind, and characteristics, of cloud computing . I want to give a big shout out to Intel who helped to fund this and also didn’t insist that we mention their products.
This first paper is a short and basic introduction to cloud computing. We are working on a follow-up that will pick up where this leaves off and dives deeper. Stay tuned.
If you’re wondering about the funky game show-like setting, I shot this after hours on the day of our launch in the whisper suite. Your guide, as before, is the incomparable Dell Solutions Architect, Rafael Zamora.
A few highlights
The C1100 is a high memory, cluster optimized, compute node
Dont let its slim pizza box looks fool you, upfront you can pack either four 3.5 inch drives or ten 2.5 inch drives.
For high memory optimized compute you can get 18 DIMM sticks for 144GB of RAM.
Comes with your choice of either Intel’s Nehalem or Westmere processors.
Raf also gives a couple of examples of recent customers and how they’ve decide to configure their units.
As a follow on to last week’s PowerEdge C line overview, here is the first individual system overview: the C6100. Click below and let Dell Solutions Architect Rafael Zamora guide your thru the design and features of this densely packed machine targeted at HPC and cloud workloads.
Some of the highlights:
The PowerEdgeC 6100 holds the equivalent of 4 systems which have been packaged into “sleds,” each containing boards, RAM and microprocessors.
Upfront you can put a ton o’ disk drives, either 24 x 2.5″ drives or 12 x 3.5″ drives.
Great for markets like HPC clustering and search engines where compute density is key. (This is not intended for running general purpose apps like Exchange, SQL or Oracle).
It will serve as the compute node in the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud solution from our partner Canonical.
I recorded this interview with David Lang earlier this year and have been meaning to post it for the longest time. David is Dell’s program manager for federal security which means he is charge of the team that supports the security requirements for all Dell’s businesses that faces the federal government. He’s based in DC but I was able to grab a bit of his time when he was out visiting Austin.
David’s interesting background: he spent many years as a special agent in the air force doing computer and espionage investigations and how this lead him to the cloud.
How David addresses questions around cloud security and what type of environments you find in federal space.
The balancing act between availability, security and cost and where Homeland Security would want to use the public cloud.
Last week I arrived a day before our launch to record videos with some of our cloud partners. My first stop was Greenplum to interview co-founder and president, Scott Yara (look for that video here in the near distant future).
Given that turnaround is fair play they asked me to appear in a short promo video that they were putting together for Chorus. Chorus will be officially announced on April 12 and is intended to marry the power of cloud computing and social collaboration with data warehousing and analytics.
I had no idea the illustrious company I would end up being edited-in alongside including my former uber-boss, Scott McNealy (who will be keynoting Greenplum’s Nov 12 event) and UC Berkeley Comp Sci Prof Joseph Hellerstein.
Posted by Barton George 
