A Quick look at Dell’s Analyst Summit

October 29, 2010

Earlier this week Dell held an industry analyst summit in Boston.  The event, “Dell Services and Solutions for the Virtual Era” was attended by analysts from around the world and was a follow-on to the event Dell held in San Francisco back in March.

Please take your seats, the summit is about to begin.

What went on

The two-day event featured presentations from Dell’s senior leadership, customer and partner panels, break out sessions and 1:1′s between analysts and Dell subject matter experts.  The first day also culminated with a solutions expo and dinner held at the very cool Institute of Contemporary Art.

What were the key messages?

The high-level messages that Dell kept reiterating were:

  • We are executing on our strategy of delivering solutions that are open, capable and affordable which ultimately give our customers the power to do more.
  • We are undergoing a fundamental change in the way we’re approaching our customers. We are moving away from transactional selling motions toward a more consultative approach.

Right before the guests arrive. The solutions expo and dinner.

How was it received?

It will be interesting to see the reports that are generated from this week’s summit but we did receive some very positive tweets during the event (check out the whole twitter feed from the event):

  • Conclusion from [Dell Analyst Summit]: Dell 2.0 has arrived. We’ve called it 1.x to date. No longer. They’ve cracked the “solutions” code — Jonathan Eunice, Illuminata
  • Dell’s vision is quite clear and lingo shows detachment from manufacturer approach – openness remains as a mantra — Giorgio Nebuloni, IDC
  • Dell talking solution accelerators. Didn’t hear this message from them a few yrs ago. Highlights strengths of Perot & Dell 2gether — Tim Sheedy, Forrester
  • Great session with Dell Health IT team. Great progress and compelling positioning in the space. Good prog telling a sngl story — Crawford Del Prete, IDC

Updated 11/04

Here are interviews I did with two of the analysts who attended the summit:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Cloud gamers OnLive on working with Dell DCS

October 24, 2010

In my last entry I talked about how Steve Perlman, CEO and founder of OnLive joined the recent press round table we had in New York.  OnLive is a cloud-based gaming company that launched earlier this year and whose servers were custom built by Dell’s Data Center Solution (DCS) group.

To give you a bit more insight into how the two companies worked together, here is a short video with Bruce Grove, OnLive’s director of strategic relations talking about the relationship between Dell and OnLive.

Some of the ground Bruce covers:

  • The value, as a start up, of working with someone who knows how to do supply chain, logistics and build tons of servers.
  • Working together as a team to design the servers (engineering teams on both sides as well as manufacturing teams).

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

El Reg love: “Dell’s DCS is a big shiny server star”

October 19, 2010

Timothy Prickett Morgan of everyone’s favorite vulture-branded media site The Register attended a round table discussion we held a few weeks ago in New York.  His piece from that event, which was focused around the cloud, was posted yesterday.

You should check out the whole article but here are some snippets to whet your appetite:

What DCS is all about

For the past several years – and some of them not particularly good ones – Dell’s Data Center Services (DCS) bespoke iron-making forge down in Round Rock, Texas, has been a particularly bright spot in the company’s enterprise business.

The unit has several hundred employees, who craft and build custom server kit for these picky Webby shops, where power and cooling issues actually matter more than raw performance. The high availability features necessary to keep applications running are in the software, so you can rip enterprise-class server features out of the boxes – they are like legs on a snake.

How we’re working with web-based gaming company OnLive

“These guys took a bet on Facebook early, and they benefited from that,” says Perlman [OnLive Founder and CEO]. “And now they are making a bet on us.”

OnLive allows gamers to play popular video games on their PCs remotely through a Web browser and soon on their TVs with a special (and cheap) HDMI and network adapter. The games are actually running back in OnLive’s data centers, and the secret sauce that Perlman has been working on to make console games work over the Internet and inside of a Web browser is what he called “error concealment”.

DCS had to create a custom server to integrate their video compression board into the machine, as well as pack in some high-end graphics cards to drive the games. Power and cooling are big issues. And no, you can’t see the servers. It’s a secret.

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Dell’s hyper scale cloud efforts — Everything you wanted to know in 3 minutes

October 14, 2010

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
  • Dell’s cloud partner program – where Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, Aster Data and Greenplum fit in.
  • Dell’s commitment to OpenStack

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

In-database analytics explained by Forrester’s James Kobielus

October 11, 2010

The week before last I headed up to Chicago to attend our partner Aster Data’s Big Data Insights summit.  One of the featured speakers was James Kobielus of Forrester Research, a leading expert on data warehousing, predictive analytics, data mining, and complex event processing.

With that background I thought Jim would be the perfect guy to ask about in-database analytics (where the actual analytics is colocated  in the data warehouse rather than having to schlep data from the warehouse to a separate analytics application).  So I did.

Some of the ground Jim covers:

  • Although there’s some new stuff there, in-database analytics is an old approach.
  • What’s new is we finally have an open interface/standard that allows a wider range of applications to be pushed down into the database and executed there.
  • Moving from proprietary interfaces/languages towards an open standard built on Map Reduce/Hadoop.
  • The benefits of this open approach
  • Aster Data as an evangelist for in database analytics

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Meet OpenStack’s Community Manager

October 6, 2010

One of the key ingredients for the success of any open source project is a strong community manager.  Coming on board to fill that role for the not-quite three-month-old OpenStack project is Stephen Spector. (If you’re not familiar with OpenStack, it’s an open source cloud platform).

Stephen made his first public appearance in his new role today at the Rackspace partner summit in San Antonio.  I was able to catch Stephen first thing this morning before the summit kicked off.

Some of the ground Stephen covers:

  • His background: 14 yrs at Citrix.  He initially ran developer alliance programs.  He spent the last 3yrs running the Xen.org community.
  • Why Stephen joined OpenStack (he jumped at the chance to build a community from scratch).
  • He sees his role as that of a communication conduit
  • One of his first tasks is to find out who makes up the community e.g. developers, users, students, research, partners..
  • He’s very interested in making events like next months design summit successful as well as the importance of globalization.
  • If you have any questions at all regarding the project contact Stephen at stephen.spector@openstack.org

Extra credit reading:

Pau for now..

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Posted by Barton George

El Reg gives DCS props for HPC innovation

October 5, 2010

The week before last a crew from Dell was out at NVIDIA’s GPU tech conference, showing our latest and greatest offerings in the HPC space.  It looks like our PowerEdge C410x expansion chassis system caught the eye of the Register HPC blog writer Dan Olds.

Below are some excerpts from Dan’s article, “Dell gets busy with GPUs” followed by the video he shot.   I love the video theme music and the fact that its a “BPV (Bad Production Values) presentation.”  [BTW We'll have to give Dan the full Data Center Solutions(DCS) rundown at some point so that he can see that when it comes to design and innovation, the C410x is not an outlier :) ]

From Dan’s Article:

Okay, let’s put it on the table: when the conversation turns to cutting-edge x86 server design and innovation, the name “Dell” doesn’t come up all that often. Their reputation was made on delivering decent products quickly at a low cost. I see that opinion in all of our x86 customer-based research – it’s even something that Dell employees will cop to.

That said, two of the most innovative and cutting-edge designs on the GPU Tech Conference show floor were sitting in the Dell booth, and that’s the topic of this video blog….

It’s the second product that really captured my interest. Their PowerEdge C410x is a 3U PCIe expansion chassis that can hold up to 16 PCIe devices and connect up to eight servers with Gen2 x16 PCIe cables. Customers can use it to host NVIDIA Fermi GPU cards, SSDs, Infiniband, or any other PCIe device their heart desires. What made my motor run was the possibility of cramming it full of Fermi cards and then using it as an enterprise shared device – NAC: Network Attached Compute.

…Dell deserves kudos for putting out this box. It’s a step ahead of what HP and IBM are currently offering, and it moves the ball forward toward an NAC future.

Extra credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

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