Check us out at next week’s OpenStack Design Summit

September 29, 2011

If you’re planning on attending the OpenStack Design summit and conference next week in Beantown you’ll have to check us out.  I’m bummed that I will be missing the  summit for the first time, I have a big internal presentation next week, but the rest of the Dell OpenStack crew will be there in force.  Dell is a sponsor at the event and we will have a keynote, speaking sessions and demos.

What have we got in the works?

Besides checking out Crowbar and our Openstack solution which we launched back at OSCON we will  have a whisper suite where we will be showing our latest and greatest stuff that is currently in the works.  If you’d like  to see what we have up our sleeve, email us at OpenStack@Dell.com and we can schedule a time slot for you to come and see for yourself.

Updated: For more details what we’ll be doing at the summit check out Rob’s blog

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

1 Comment | Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Barton George

Is Data the currency of the Internet or is it the new oil?

September 28, 2011

I have “long” thought that data is the currency of the Internet, it is what is monetized and when aggregated, parsed and made accessible, where the value lies for businesses and individuals.  I was interested then to read in Rich Miller’s article about another analogy that had recently been drawn:

“Data is the new oil,” said Andreas Weigend, social data guru and former chief scientist at Amazon.com. “Oil needs to be refined before it can be useful. Big data startups are the new refineries.”

Another way of putting this might be to say that the internet runs on data.

Just a few thoughts to share over my much needed morning coffee.  Talk amongst yourselves.

Pau for now…

Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Barton George

Props from GigaOm for Dell as Web outfitter

September 26, 2011

Dell has been working for the last four plus years outfitting the biggest of the big web superstars like Facebook and Microsoft Azure with infrastructure.   More recently we have been layering software  such as Hadoop, OpenStack and crowbar on top of  that infrastructure.  This has not gone unnoticed by web pub GigaOm:

Want to become the next Amazon Web Services or Facebook? Dell could have sold you the hardware all along, but now it has the software to make those servers and storage systems really hum.

They also made the following observation:

Because [Dell] doesn’t have a legacy [software] business to defend, it can blaze a completely new trail that has its trailhead where Oracle, IBM and HP leave off.

Letting customers focus on what matters most

Its a pretty exciting time to be at Dell as we continue to move up the stack outfitting web players big and small.  The idea is to get these players established and growing in an agile and elastic way so they can concentrate on serving customers rather than building out their underpinning software and systems.

Stay tuned for more!

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

Leave a Comment » | Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Barton George

A Walk-through of Dell’s Modular Data Center

September 13, 2011

In my last entry I featured a video with the Bing Maps imagery team.  In it they talked about why they went with Dell’s Modular Data Center (MDC) to help power and process all the image data they crunch.  For a deeper dive and a look at one of these babies from the inside join Ty Schmitt and Mark Bailey in the following video as they walk you through the MDC and how it works.

Some of the ground Ty and Mark cover

  • The various modules that make up the MDC
  • The topology of the system
  • How the outside temperature dictates which of the three cooling methods is used
  • The racks inside the MDC and how they were able to pull the fans out of the individual servers
  • A closure look at the power module

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

2 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Barton George

Bing Maps team on why they went with Dell

September 13, 2011

A little while ago I posted an entry talking about how Bing Maps was using Dell’s Modular Data Centers to power their new uber-efficient, uber-compact data center (or as Microsoft calls it  “microsite”), located in Longmont, Colorado.  But don’t take my word for it…

Below is a recent video of members of the Bing Maps’ imagery team, Tom Barclay, Brad Clark and Ryan Tracy, talking about what their needs were and why they chose Dell.  (BTW, the written case study is also available now).

Some of the ground the team covers

  • Bing Maps leading the way and  trying things out at Microsoft before the rest of the company.
  • Producing the imagery for Bing Maps including photographing all of the US and Western Europe and then stitching it all together with the help of tremendous processing power.
  • Their goal was to bring on additional capacity to support current and future site goals at the lowest cost, in the fastest amount of time with the least amount of down time.
  • Why they went with Dell and what they gained.

Extra-Credit reading

Pau for now…

2 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Barton George

Now available: Dell | Cloudera solution for Apache Hadoop

September 12, 2011

A few weeks ago we announced that Dell, with a little help from Cloudera, was delivering a complete Apache Hadoop solution.  Well as of last week its now officially available!

As a refresher:

The solution is comprised of Cloudera’s distribution of Hadoop, running on optimized Dell PowerEdge C2100 servers with Dell PowerConnect 6248 switch, delivered with joint service and support from both companies.  You can buy it either pre-integrated and good-to-go or you can take the DIY route and set up yourself with the help of

Learn more at the Dell | Cloudera page.

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

3 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Barton George

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.