The Cloud is a marathon — Marten Mickos, Eucalyptus CEO

June 24, 2010

Yesterday at the GigaOM Structure conference here in San Francisco, I ran into Marten Mickos, the recently appointed CEO of Eucalyptus systems.  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.

Marten, the former CEO of MySQL took the helm of Eucalyptus about three months ago, and was at Structure both as an attendee and participant, sitting on two panels at this two-day cloud-a-polooza.  At the end of the day-one I got some time with Marten and asked him about his new gig.

Some of the topics Marten tackles:

  • How he made the decision to go to Eucalyptus. (Hint: he asked the question, what’s bigger than Open Source)
  • What is Eucalyptus and whats it based on?
  • How will Marten’s experience at MySQL and Sun help him in his new role at Eucalyptus?
    • MySQL was a disrupter of the old whereas Eucalyptus is an innovator of the new.
    • Sun’s company culture was phenomenal, the technology was phenomenal, the business…um…
  • What Eucalyptus is doing with Canonical and the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.
  • What Eucalyptus is focusing on for the next year.

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Pics from Structure opening festivities

June 24, 2010

Last night, as a lead in to today’s Structure conference, there were two events scheduled here in San Francisco.  The first was a cocktail party hosted by AMD.  The second was a private dinner hosted by GigaOM where each of the sponsors got to send a representative.

Here are some pictures from the two events.

The AMD cocktail party was held in a very cool space. Here it is not long after it opened.

We showed off some of our AMD-based custom systems.

Before long the party was packed (and hot).

I decided to walk from the party to the dinner. The restaurant, the Waterbar, was right under the Bay Bridge.

A bow and arrow along the way.

Pre-dinner drinks.

Pre-dinner remarks with the Bay Bridge as a backdrop. L->R , Mathew Ingram, CEO Paul Walborsky and Stacey Higginbotham

Stay tuned for more stuff from Structure.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Chocolate covered servers?

June 22, 2010

Is that a heat sink under the Laffy Taffy?

There was a great article about Dell’s Data Center Solutions group that came out a couple of weeks ago.  The article, entitled “Willy Wonka and the Dell Factory,” starts out

If Dell’s cloud server lab is a candy shop for geeks, littered with components and exotic system designs, then Jimmy Pike is the Willy Wonka of servers.

The author then takes the reader on a tour of the top secret Dell Cloud lab explaining,

Like Willy Wonka in the book by Roald Dahl, Pike’s job is to combine ingredients in new and sometimes radical ways. Instead of chocolate and blueberries, his ingredients are chips, fans and motherboards. “Sometimes we bend metal and put boards together with duct tape,” he said…

Servers became “boring” for a while, Pike said, but the requirements of cloud computing have made his job interesting again. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years and I’m having more fun than I’ve ever had,” he said.

And if Jimmy’s having fun, that’s a good thing for everyone. :)

Read the whole article here

Want more Jimmy? Check out his data center in a suitcase.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Cloud Camp Austin 2010

June 17, 2010

Last Thursday over a 100 cloud enthusiasts gathered for Cloud Camp Austin.  The event was held at Pervasive Software‘s headquarters and kicked off after 5PM with munchies and beer.  The event brought in folks all around Austin as well as visitors from exotic areas like upstate New York (the group had been in town for meetings).

Pre camp munchies and drinks as folks assemble.

Dell was one of the sponsors along with IBM, Microsoft, Twilio, Tropo, Redmonk and our  hosts Pervasive .  As always, the event was guided along by Mr. cloud camp, Dave Nielsen.  Being an “unconference,” after a spontaneously assembled “unpanel” who was called upon to answer questions from the audience, the crowd worked together to decide on the topics that would be discussed.

Dave Nielsen explains how this "unpanel" is going to work.

What a difference a year makes

I attended last year’s cloud camp in Austin and I don’t know if its the fact the industry has evolved so much since then or that this year there was a greater percentage of knowledgeable attendees (I suspect a little of both) but this year the topics and questions were much more sophisticated/technical.  As a results the conversations were much more meaty and focused more on “how to” rather than “how do you define.”

All in all a very cool event.

The schedule created on the fly by the attendees.

If you liked Cloud Camp and you like Hadoop, you’ll love…

Speaking of camps, Dave Nielsen is taking the camp idea and applying it to the world of Big Data.  The event, which will be held in Santa Clara on June 28, is imaginatively entitled, Big Data Camp Santa Clara.  This unconference  is targeted at users of Hadoop and related technologies and is held the night before Hadoop summit 2010.  So if you’re in the area and Hadoop/Big Data are your thing, check it out.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Onlive’s gaming cloud powered by custom Dell servers

June 15, 2010

Today at E3, OnLive Inc is kicking off the roll out of its cloud gaming service.  OnLive, whose motto is “Just Play,” leverages broadband and the cloud to deliver on-demand gaming titles directly to users’ PCs, Macs or even TVs.

Square Enix's Batman: Arkham Asylum -- one of the first batch of games available from OnLive

This new service could prove to be a real “game changer.”  As Dell Data Center Solutions director Andy Rhodes, helping with the launch at E3 explains, “I see it as the start as of a move of processing power from consoles into data centers…from the center of the living room into the data center.”

Building the OnLive Cloud

So what’s behind this gaming cloud, Dell of course :) (well, at least a good part of it).  The Dell Data Center Solutions (DCS) group began working with OnLive a few years back to design and build custom-tailored systems for the OnLive platform.

The problem statement for the solution was to create an infrastructure that supported the streaming of HD-quality video game over the internet, drove down the total cost of ownership and allowed OnLive to scale quickly as the company grows.  The DCS team worked directly with the folks from OnLive to architect an ultra-dense and uber-power efficient infrastructure solution designed around OnLive’s super secret hardware components and software.  Thousand of these customized systems are now deployed at OnLive data centers around the country.

Plug and Play Racks

By leveraging the DCS supply chain and fulfillment chops, Dell is able to deliver pre-integrated fully racked solutions that can be hooked up and powered on within hours of arriving at an OnLive data center.  Going forward Dell will continue to work with OnLive to create new infrastructure architectures for future generations of the service.

Game on! (and on, and on and on)

Electronic Arts' Mass Attack 2: available via OnLive

Who’s on First?

The initial batch of 23 titles available to OnLive subscribers include:

  • Assassin’s Creed II (Ubisoft)
  • Batman: Arkham Asylum (Square-Enix)
  • Borderlands (Take Two Interactive Entertainment)
  • Dragon Age: Origins (Electronic Arts)
  • Just Cause 2 (Square-Enix)
  • Mass Effect 2 (Electronic Arts)
  • NBA 2K10 (Take Two Interactive Entertainment)
  • Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands (Ubisoft)
  • Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Conviction (Ubisoft)

Extra Credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

An overview of the worldwide gaming market

June 11, 2010

Dell’s Data Center Solutions (DCS) group has both custom offerings and, as we announced a couple of months ago, a new line of systems and solutions targeted at a wider audience.

One the the key markets we are looking at for our new line is gaming.  To get up to speed on the market I took a look at the report that the PC gaming alliance put together for its members.  It was a very cool read.  Here a few things I learned:

Some fun facts to know and tell:

  • Last year the global PC game software market was just over $13B while the global console software market was nearly $20B.
  • The revenue from PC games  is expected to pass the revenue from console software in 2012.
  • Last year China was the leading country for PC game revenue, 99+% which came from non-retail sources e.g. subscriptions and digital distribution.
  • Worldwide piracy is decreasing as PC games move from package software to a service based business where users pay per usage.
  • On a revenue basis the majority or leading PC game companies come from China or South Korea.
  • Biggest growth last year came from the free-to-play (F2P) games where delivery of these games on social networks like Zynga’s Farmville on Facebook took off.

Stay tuned…

Dell has publicly been a big player in the PC gaming market through our line of Alienware systems (in fact we had an announcement yesterday).  Where we have been a lot quieter however is talking about how our Data Center Solutions (DCS) group fits in.   Next week at E3 we will be making an announcement to explain just what we’ve been up to.  So stay tuned next week and see how DCS “plays” in gaming :)

Pau for now….

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Posted by Barton George

Talking to Joyent’s CTO and co-founder: Jason Hoffman

June 3, 2010

When I was out in the Bay Area for our launch a while back I stopped by Joyent‘s new headquarters (I actually visited them on their very first day in their new digs). I chatted with CTO Jason Hoffman about his background, what Joyent’s all about and what they are doing with Dell.  Take a listen:

Some of the topics Jason tackles

  • What Joyent does (hint: they provide virtual datacenters)
  • Joyent customers: they range from the top facebook applications, on line media companies, movie, music and tv studios, online retailers…
  • Your next computer is the data center — which needs operating environment, an open API and a good set of developer tools.
  • How Jason got to where he is: via a Doctorate in pathology where he was an end consumer of compute.  He realized that a lot of the efficiencies that they had developed in his field could be applied to a hosting environment.
  • Dell as Joyent’s “private cloud arm:” Joyent software running on Dell’s hardware where Dell can come in and set up the entire environment enabling departments within companies to act as service providers within their organizations.

To put it in perspective…

And since we’re talking about Joyent and Dell and Joyent working together I thought I would include this excerpt from a post that Redmonk analyst Stephen O’Grady recently wrote about the private cloud:

At the present time, however, most of that which we call Platform-as-a-Service – the layer currently serving as middleware – is public cloud only. The PaaS fabrics tend to be proprietary and not available for private consumption. Salesforce.com, for example, doesn’t let you replicate Force.com on your servers. Ditto for Google App Engine. Microsoft Azure features may be trickling back into Windows, but you’re not going to be running Azure in your local datacenter. This is why Dell’s distribution of Joyent’s cloud software came as such a surprise to many; you just don’t see these fabrics being made available locally.

Extra-credit reading

  • Survey Shows More Than Half of Dynamic Language Developers Are Looking To Build Cloud-based Applications in Next Year

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

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