Barton's Blog

Aster’s Big Data Architecture

Barton George — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:40:25 +0000

As I mentioned in my last entry, the week before last I headed out to the TDWI World Conference in San Diego. Besides talking about Dell’s new BI practice, I was there to represent our data analytics partners, Aster Data and Greenplum. Both vendors also had booths of their own and I was able to grab some time with Jeff Zeisler, director of pre-sales engineers at Aster Data, to get an overview of their architecture. Here’s what Jeff had to say:

Some of the ground Jeff covers:

Aster is a MPP (massively-parallel processing) data warehouse solution. It runs on a cluster of commodity hardware that execute SQL queries in parallel.
The 3 layers to the architecture:
- Queen tier – central location users use to submit queries. It figures out how to split up the query and send it to the next tier.
- Worker tier – where most of the servers are located, where data is stored (locally on the servers) and where all the heavy lifting for processing occurs. The map reduce framework is built into this tier and sits right next to the SQL execution engine.
- Loader and exporter tier: a separate tier of machines that can be used to load new data into the system for bulk loading.
How it works: Query gets broken up across all the machines, they each execute some portion of the query and the result are brought back together at the Queen and returned to the user.
New cool things coming up in the next 6 months.

Extra:

Pre-recorded Webcast: Harnessing the Power of Cloud Infrastructure To Supercharge Analytics
Interview: Aster Data’s CEO & Co-founder — Mayank Bawa
Interview: Dell has a BI practice?!

Pau for now…

Dell has a BI practice?!

Barton George — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 02:09:50 +0000

The week before last I headed out to The Data Warehouse Institute’s (TDWI) World Conference in San Diego. I went out to help support our BI team who were using the event as the forum to unveil Dell’s new Business Intelligence practice.

We got a bunch of puzzled looks as people approached the Dell booth and didn’t see any hardware. Once however they learned what we were there to announce and why, they seemed to buy it (or maybe they just said they got it because they didn’t want to lose out on a chance to win the Dell Mini we were giving away

BI veteran, Mike Lampa, who has been driving the go-to market effort behind the practice acted as our chief spokesperson. Here’s the message we were delivering, straight from Mike:

Some of the ground Mike covers:

Internally, Dell has one of the top 5 data warehouse implementations in world and we use most of the mainstream ETL, BI and database tools that are out there in the market.
The Perot acquisition has given us access to a global services delivery engine and we are marrying this channel with the BI expertise we’ve developed internally.
We’ll provide consulting services through our verticals and deliver end to end solutions targeted at vertical markets like Education, Health Care and Financial services.
Our goal is to do in services what we did in hardware, be a disruptive force and bring in higher levels of innovation.

Extra Credit Reading

Mike’s blog: Business Intelligence Insight and Perspective

Pau for now…

Chattin ’bout Chatter, The new new thing from salesforce.com

Barton George — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 13:08:14 +0000

A couple of weeks ago a group from salesforce.com paid a visit to Dell. Among other things, they came to discuss their new product “Chatter” that Dell has recently launched internally and who’s virtues Michael Dell has tweeted. Among the salesforce crew was Sean Whiteley, VP of product marketing. I was able to get some time between meetings with Sean and learn more about Chatter.

Some of the topics Sean tackles:

How Chatter has done since its launch on June 22. What type of traction they’ve seen with customers.
How Chatter differs from other internal social media platforms (hint: not only can you follow people; records, objects and information within your business applications have feeds as well, e.g. your notified when a presentation changes or a sales deal you’re following moves to a different stage.)
How the idea of Chatter came up. What role chairman Marc Benioff and his use of Facebook played.
Currently Chatter is tied closely to CRM but it will be tied to other apps going forward.
They believe that many more folks will use Chatter than usesalesforce.com.

Extra Credit reading:

eWeek.com: Salesforce.com Seeks to Make Chatter an All-Purpose Collaboration Tool
BusinessWeek: Salesforce.com Channels Facebook
An earlier interview I did with Sean: Cloud Pioneer, Salesforce.com

Pau for now…

Sun’s Chief Open Source Officer’s new Gig

Barton George — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 21:32:14 +0000

Last but not least in my series of interviews from last month’s Cloud Summit at OSCON I present to you my conversation with Simon Phipps. Simon, who until earlier this year was the chief Open Source officer at Sun Microsystems, recently joined the start-up ForgeRock as their chief strategy officer. Here is what Simon says:

Some of the topics Simon tackles:

ForgeRock offers access management and authentication software based on open source code that was developed at Sun.
Since the software is open source you can download it for free at ForgeRock.
ForgeRock makes its money by selling subscriptions that provide various grades of SLAs.
Even though they are 4 mos old, they already have 20 customers including the world’s largest gambling exchange.

Extra credit reading:

ComputerWorld: Sun open source reborn in ForgeRock
Simon’s regular blog for ComputerWorld UK: Simon Says

Pau for now…

Chief Scientist at BT: “In nature there are no SLAs”

Barton George — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 13:57:22 +0000

J.P. Rangaswamy is British Telecom’s chief scientist and a very interesting fellow. At the Cloud Summit at OSCON last month he delivered a talk on the future of the cloud. I was quite intrigued so I grabbed him during the break to learn a bit more about a few of the concepts he presented.

Some of the topics that J.P. tackles:

Many of the best utilities we’ve built: Internet, Web, wireless environment etc are built on fundamentally frail best-effort infrastructures.
In order to gain predictability you sacrifice a lot of the original value eg. QWERTY
He’s not against SLAs, J.P.’s against the throwing away of value under the guise of false beliefs in SLAs.
What is the key area in the cloud that needs to be shored up? Interoperability. Security is overplayed, just look at the development of the Web.
Need to concentrate on federation as a mind set — the ability to create services that are daisy chaining select pieces from a variety of each, vs integrated vertical stacks.
He’s worried about SLAs because the things people are doing to stop SLAs from being light weight are actually things that prevent interoperability.

Pau for now…

OpenStack insights and code

Barton George — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 02:22:24 +0000

I’m now at the mid-point of the videos I shot at OSCON Cloud Summit a few weeks ago. Today’s feature is Brett Piatt from the OpenStack ecosystem development team who has been working on the project since it kicked off nine months ago. Brett’s particular area of focus is the partners who have joined and are participating in the effort. I got some of Brett’s time after the cloud summit ended and this is what he had to say:

Some of the topics Brett tackles:

Over 20 companies participating from hardware makers to software vendors who help you manage or operate OpenStack, e.g. Cloud kick and Rightscale as well as other service providers (who are actually Rackspace competitors.)
The Rackspace API and coupling it with feature releases.
The projects near term goal which is to get it in production beyond Rackspace and NASA.
What code is available now – OpenStack object storage (aka Swift) which powers Rackspace’s cloud files.
The Nova code = Rackspace cloud sw + NASA’s Nebula cloud = Cloud and VM orchestration system management package. It’s mostly written in Python, some C & C++ as well as a dash of Erlang. It also has built-in ipad, iphone apps, android apps and web control panel — something for the whole family!

Still to come in my OSCON video series:

J.P. Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at BT — Nature doesn’t require SLAs
Simon Phipps about his new company ForgeRock

Pau for now…

PowerEdge C410x — Whiteboard topology

Barton George — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 04:44:04 +0000

In the last of my GPGPU/PowerEdge C410x trilogy I offer up a whiteboard session with the system’s architect, Joe Sekel.

Some of the topics Joe walks through:

How does having remote GPGPUs connected via cable back to a server compare in performance to having the GPGPUs embedded in the server?
The topology of the PCI express x16 (16 lanes per link) plumbing: from the chipset in the host sever through to the GPGPU.
The data transfer bandwidth that x16 Gen 2 gives you.

Extra-credit reading:

Blog: Say hello to my little friend — packing up to 16 GPGPUs
Blog: Deep dive tour(s) of the PowerEdge C410x
Blog from our GM about today’s announcement: Paving the way for powerful thinkers

Pau for now…

Deep dive tour(s) of the PowerEdge C410x

Barton George — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 03:56:02 +0000

In my last entry I talked about the wild and wacky world of GPGPUs and provided an overview of the PowerEdge C410x expansion chassis that we announced today. For those of you who want to go deeper and see how to set up and install this 3U wonder you’ll want to take a look at the three videos below.

Card installation: How to install/replace a NVIDIA Tesla M1060 GPU card in the PowerEdge C410x taco.
Setting up the system: How to set up the PowerEdge C410x PCIe expansion chassis in a rack, power it up and pull out cards. Also addresses port numbering.
BMC card mapping: How to map the PCIe cards in the PowerEdge C410x via the BMC web interface. Also covered are how to monitor power usage, fans and more.

Happy viewing! (BTW, the C410x’s code name was “titanium” so when you hear Chris refer to it as that don’t be thrown)

Extra-credit reading:

Blog: Say hello to my little friend — packing up to 16 GPGPUs
Blog: PowerEdge C410x — Whiteboard topology
Blog from our GM about today’s announcement: Paving the way for powerful thinkers

Pau for now…

Say hello to my little friend — packing up to 16 GPGPUs

Barton George — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 03:18:38 +0000

While the name GPGPU, which stands for General-purpose computing on graphics processing units, doesn’t flow lyrically off the tongue, it’s an extremely powerful concept.

What’s the big idea?

The idea behind this sexy five letter acronym is to take a graphical process unit (GPU) and expand its use beyond graphics. Through the “simple” addition of programmable stages and higher precision arithmetic to the rendering pipelines, the GPU is able to tackle general computing and off load it from the CPU.

So what does this mean and/or why should you care? Well the connection of GPGPUs to servers bring about ginormous increases in performance helping to make HPC and scaled-out deployments wicked fast. This works particularly well when you’re talking about modeling, simulation, imaging, signal processing, gaming etc. Not only can the addition of GPGPUs boost these processes by one or two orders of magnitude but it does so much more cost effectively than by simply adding servers.

What is Dell’s DCS group offering up?

The Data Center Solutions (DCS) team have an Oil & Gas customer that is always looking to push the envelope when it comes to getting the most out of GPGPU’s in order to deliver seismic mapping results faster. One of the best ways to do this is by increasing the GPU to server ratio. In the market today, there are a variety of servers that have 1-2 internal GPUs and there is a PCIe expansion chassis that has 4 GPUs.

What we announced today is the PowerEdge C410x PCIe expansion chassis, the first PCIe expansion chassis to connect 1-8 servers to 1-16 GPUs. This chassis enables massive parallel calculations separate from the server, adding up to 16.48 teraflops of computational power to a datacenter.

But enough of my typing, see for yourself in the overview/walk-thru below starring DCS’s very own Joe Sekel, the architect behind the C410x.

Extra-credit reading

Blog from our GM about today’s announcement: Paving the way for powerful thinkers
Blog: Deep dive tour(s) of the PowerEdge C410x
Blog: PowerEdge C410x — Whiteboard topology
The Register: PowerEdge snuggles with fast GPUs and fat SSDs
Scientific Computing: GPGPUs Invade Supercomputing

Pau for now…

5 lessons from the Cloud about Efficient Environments

Barton George — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 02:08:53 +0000

The week before last our team decided to divide and conquer to cover two simultaneous events. Half of us headed to Portland, Oregon for OSCON and the other half stayed here in Austin to participate in hostingcon.

The Hostingcon keynote

Among those participating in hostingcon was my boss Andy Rhodes who gave the keynote on Tuesday. Here’s are the slides Andy delivered:

(If the presentation doesn’t appear above, click here to view it.)

The idea of the keynote was to share with hosters the five major lessons we have learned over the last several years working with a unique set of customers operating at hyperscale. Those five lessons are:

TCO models are not one size fits all. Build a unique model that represents your specific environment and make sure that you get every dollar of cost in there. Additionally, make sure that your model is flexible enough to accommodate new info and market changes.
Don’t let the status quo hold you back. Not adapting soon enough and delays in rolling out solutions can cost you dearly.
The most expensive server/storage node is the one that isn’t used (sits idle for 6-12 weeks) or the one you don’t have when you need it most.
Don’t let Bad Code dictate your hardware architecture.
Don’t waste time on “Cloud Washing.” Talk to your customers about real pain points and how to solve them.

The WHIR’s take

The WHIR did a good write up of the keynote, here is the concluding paragraph:

So, it seems that cloud best practices will help companies reduce their physical infrastructure, which seems to be a bit counter-intuitive, given that Rhodes is representing a hardware provider. But it makes sense. Given the never-ending list of projects for IT staff, and as they drive down costs, their business will grow, and they’ll be able to increase their IT spend for innovative efforts. “What we’re hoping to do is let you do more with less.”

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

Customer reviews our 4-servers-in-one, the C6100

Barton George — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 02:46:22 +0000

Outbrain is a company that provides content recommendation solutions for blogs and publishers. Among their customers are such venerable names as USA today, Chicago Tribune, Slate and VentureBeat.

Data Center number three

The company recently decided to set-up a third data center and went out looking for what type of kit they wanted to outfit it with. Much to our joy they decided on the Dell PowerEdge C6100. Although they are currently waiting on delivery of the systems, Outbrain operations engineer Nathan Milford, has been playing with a demo unit for several weeks.

Earlier this week Nathan posted his initial thoughts, along with pictures and diagrams, on the C6100. The post is appropriately entitled: Some Notes on Dell’s C6100 Multi-Node Server Chassis

In his post Nathan talks about:

Who else they looked at and why they went with Dell
The basic layout of the C6100
The “unscientific” testing, research and math he did on power draw on an individual node.
How intends to deal with some of quirks and infrastructure changes the C6100s will cause.

My favorite quote from the post is:

SuperMicro, SGI, HP all have similar devices, but the thing they don’t have is DCS, which is more or less independent of Dell and can be agile like a smaller vendor, but with Dell’s backing and resources.

You’ll want to check back on Nathan’s blog as he plans to add to his notes after the servers are installed.

Extra-credit reading:

A short video tour of the PowerEdge C6100.

Pau for now…

Ubuntu, the Cloud and the Future — Neil Levine

Barton George — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 20:17:01 +0000

After the cloud summit last week at OSCON, I sat down with Neil Levine of Canonical to see what was in store for Ubuntu cloud-wise (Canonical is a partner of ours in our cloud ISV program). Neil is the VP of Canonical’s corporate services division which handles their cloud and server products.

Here’s what Neil had to say:

Some of the topics Neil tackles:

The next Ubuntu release “Maverick Meerkat” and its geek-a-licious launch date: 10.10.10.
Look for Maverick to make Eucalyptus even easier to deploy and use.
Data processing and data analytics is one of the key use cases in the cloud and Canonical is looking to move up the stack and provide deep integration for other apps like Hadoop and NoSQL.
What are some of the areas of focus for next year’s two releases i.e. 11.04 and 11.10.
Project ensemble: what it is and what its goals are.

Extra-credit reading

The Register: Canonical fluffs one-click Ubuntu cloud stack
The VAR guy: Canonical adjusts Ubuntu linux partner strategy

Pau for now…

My quick spiel on the cloud

Barton George — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 02:40:46 +0000

At OSCON last week I ran into a compadre from a previous life, Fred Kohout. Fred is now the CMO at UC4, a pure play software automation company, and he, like I, was in Portland to attend OSCON and the Cloud Summit.

At the summit Fred did to me what I’ve done to so many others, he got me on the receiving end of a video camera to talk about where Dell plays in the cloud and how we see the cloud evolving.

You can check out Fred’s blog from the Summit where he posted my video as well as the interview he did with another former compadre, Peder Ulander, CMO at cloud.com.

Don’t touch that dial

If you’re interested in OSCON be sure to stay tuned. I’ve got four more interviews from the event that I will be posting soon.

Pau for now…

The OpenStack design summit in review

Barton George — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 13:53:08 +0000

Tuesday after the OSCON cloud summit I sat down with Rick Clark over a well deserved beer. Rick is the chief architect and project lead for the OpenStack compute project that was announced on Monday.

Last week I interviewed Rick on the first day of the inaugural OpenStack design summit and I wanted to catch up with him and get his thoughts on how it had gone. This is what he had to say:

Some of the topics Rick tackles:

How it went engaging a very large technical group (100+) in an open design discussion patterned after an Ubuntu Developer Summit.
Some of the decisions he thought would be no brainers, turned out differently e.g. OVF (open virtualization format) and keeping the storage and compute groups separated.
Since the summit involved representatives from over 20 companies, some of them competitors, how good were people at putting away their business biases/agendas?
How far they got (hint they got requirements from everyone for the first release).
They’ve already gotten their first code contributions.
How they plan to build a community: actively looking to hire a community manager. In the meantime its actively growing and in a week they’ve gone from 10 people in the IRC channel to 150 on Tuesday.

Extra-credit reading:

New York Times Bits: The Recipe for Clouds Goes Open-Source
The VAR guy: OpenStack Compute: The Next Cloud Standard?
Forrester: As Cloud Platforms Battle For Credibility, OpenStack Is Pretty Solid

But wait there’s more…

I got back from OSCON last night with a fist full of videos. In addition to the above, coming soon to a browser near you are the following interviews:

Brett Piatt with more OpenStack goodness
J.P. Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at BT — Nature doesn’t require SLAs
Simon Phipps about his new company ForgeRock
Neil Levine, VP at Canonical about what’s in store for Ubuntu.

Pau for now…

OpenStack Compute – talking to the chief architect

Barton George — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 04:50:41 +0000

Rick Clark used to be the engineering manager at Canonical for Ubuntu server and security as well as lead on their virtualization for their cloud efforts. He’s now at Rackspace and is applying much of what he learned while at Canonical to his new gig as project lead and chief architect of the just announced OpenStack Compute.

Rick talked to me about what he brought with him from Canonical as well as the details behind OpenStack Compute.

Some of the topics Rick tackles:

What is the OpenStack Compute project (hint its a fully open sourced IaaS project)
Leveraging what Rick learned from the Ubuntu community, including a regular six month cadence.
Rick’s goals for design summit: develop a roadmap for the first release, spec out the software and spend the last two days prototyping and hacking.
Why they went with the Apache 2 license and why not AGPL?
The Rackspace API (NASA had already started to switch from the Amazon API before combing
The project’s core principles: open, open, open

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

Talkin’ to the project lead of OpenStack Object Storage

Barton George — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 04:45:04 +0000

The first code that is available from the OpenStack project, and its available today, is the code for the storage effort, “Object Storage.” The man at the technical helm of this effort is Will Reese of Rackspace. Will’s daytime job is development manager and system architect for Rackspace’s Cloud Files, the source of the code for Object Storage. Will and I grabbed some time at last week’s design summit and he briefed me on the project:

Some of the topics Will tackles:

Object Storage is based on the open sourced code from Rackspace’s Cloud Files.
What attracted NASA to Cloud Files (think scale).
Rackspace will lead the project to get the community kick started but is looking for the community to take over.
Storage and Compute will each have their own tech boards made up of members from Rackspace, NASA and the community.
In the second half of the interview Will takes us through a quick overview of the cloud files architecture which is written in python, leverages eventlib, and borrows concepts from memcache and some key-value stores –> To learn more, check out Will’s talk at OSCON this Wednesday.

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

Introducing OpenStack — an open source cloud platform

Barton George — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 04:29:58 +0000

Today Rackspace and NASA announced OpenStack, an open source cloud platform that they are collaborating on and building a community around. Last week the inaugural OpenStack design summit was held here in Austin with 20 companies from around the world, including Dell, participating.

During one of the breaks I grabbed sometime with Rackspace’s cloud president, Lew Moorman to learn more about the effort and get his thoughts:

Some of the topics Lew tackles:

What is OpenStack (an opensource set of technologies for building clouds…)
Why Rackspace decided to opensource their code .
How Rackspace got hooked up with NASA and what each brings to the party.
Taking Nebula’s core foundation and adding some elements from Rackspace’s side in order to put together a release candidate that should be available to the community this Fall.

Extra-credit reading:

Press Release: Rackspace Open Sources Cloud Platform; Plans to Collaborate with NASA and other Industry Leaders
Blog: NASA’s chief cloud architect talks OpenStack
Blog: Talkin’ to the project lead of OpenStack Object Storage
Blog: OpenStack Compute – talking to the chief architect
OpenStack.org home page

Pau for now…

NASA’s chief cloud architect talks OpenStack

Barton George — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 20:34:22 +0000

At the inaugural design summit for OpenStack, an open source set of technologies for building clouds, Nebula’s chief architect Josh McKenty played a prominent role in leading the assembled folks. I caught Josh during a break and chatted with him about Nebula and NASA’s role in the newly announced OpenStack project. Here’s what he had to say:

Some of the topics Josh tackles:

What is Nebula (hint: NASA’s, primarily IaaS, cloud computing platform)
The history of Nebula and how it morphed from nasa.net.
Why NASA wants a cloud – and the importance of having an elastic set of resources.
NASA and Nebula’s use of open source and how it has evolved (they don’t simply fling tarballs over the wall anymore and they can use licenses other than the “NASA open source agreement”)
A match made in heaven: NASA has put together a strong compute platform and was looking to building a real object store, Rackspace had a strong object store and work looking for a new compute platform.

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

Cloud Billing and the Subscription Economy

Barton George — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 03:04:36 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I was out in the Bay Area to attend Giga OM’s Structure event. One of the interesting individuals I met there was Tien Tzuo, CEO and founder of Zuora. Zuora, which counts salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff as an investor, “bills” itself as the leader in subscription billing and payment solutions. Here is what Tien had to say:

Some of the topics Tien tackles:

Zuroa as the “Salesforce.com for online billing” (they are a hosted SaaS offering with a point and click interface.
Their focus on companies that have a recurring subscription based business model e.g. SaaS, cloud, online media…
Their launch of Zcommerce for the cloud which provides billing, reoccurring payment capability and subscription management capability for cloud environments.
The great variety of pricing and packaging models when it comes to cloud payment: an arrears model, a minimum volume commitment model a pre-pay model etc.
The concept of moving from a product-centric society to “The subscription economy,” you see it in transportation, music, computing …

Extra-credit reading

ZDNet: Zuora and the Subscription Economy
VentureBeat: Zuora Brings Its Subscription Technology to Cloud Providers

Pau for now…

Cool Article on the Dell/Azure announcement

Barton George — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 03:16:24 +0000

Monday, as part of Microsoft’s big Azure announcement, we announced that we would be both building an Azure appliance, enabling customers to build their own public or private clouds, as well as developing an Azure public cloud at Dell that our customers can use to develop and deploy next generation services on.

There has been a ton of press surrounding this move by Microsoft to broaden the market for Azure, an effort which also includes similar agreements with HP and Fujitsu. Not surprisingly, my favorite article is one by Charles King that came out yesterday in eCommerce Times — Microsoft’s Windows Azure and Dell: Blue Skies Ahead.

Check out these excerpts and you’ll see why

Dell is out of the blocks and running with Azure while its rivals are still sorting out their gym bags.

Dell’s cloud efforts tend to be one of the company’s best kept secrets. Some vendors’ continual cloud pronouncements tend to blend into a vuvuzela-like drone, but Dell has simply gotten down to the hard work of building workable commercial cloud and hyper-scale data center solutions during the past three years.

In fact, Dell was the first major vendor to launch a business unit specifically focused on the commercial cloud. By doing so, the company’s Data Center Solutions (DCS) organization has gained invaluable hands-on expertise about the specialized needs of organizations leveraging cloud technologies for applications including hosting, HPC, Web 2.0, gaming, energy social networking and SaaS. That point likely influenced Microsoft’s 2008 decision to choose Dell as a primary infrastructure partner in developing the Azure platform.

Cool stuff!

Pau for now…

The Dell / Azure Cloud & Appliance

Barton George — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 16:48:06 +0000

Several months ago in the press release that announced our Cloud Solution offerings, there was a particularly cloudy paragraph that talked about Dell’s relationship with Microsoft. The paragraph ended with the sentence: “Dell and Microsoft will collaborate on the Windows Azure platform, with Dell and Microsoft offering services, and Microsoft continuing to invest in Dell hardware for Windows Azure infrastructure.” What the heck did that mean? Well today we can be a bit clearer.

Dell Cloud based on Windows Azure

Earlier this morning at Microsoft’s Worldwide partner conference, the giant of Redmond announced the limited production release of the Windows Azure technology for a select few tech giants. Dell is one of these and will be taking this technology and creating ourselves a Platform as a service (PaaS) cloud. We will in turn use this cloud to deliver both public and private cloud services to customers looking to develop and deliver next generation cloud services based on .Net. This platform will be targeted at enterprise, public, small and medium-sized business customers as well as be used by Dell itself.

But wait, there’s more: Azure in a box

Dell and Microsoft are also working on a Dell-powered Windows Azure platform appliance. (Don’t let the term “appliance” throw you, you can’t register for this and it really represents 100s or 1000s of servers plus storage and networking). Dell will be making this turnkey cloud platform available to enterprises to enable them to set up their own PaaS clouds within their organizations. Dell has a bit of a leg up here since we’ve been working with Microsoft on Azure as the primary infrastructure partner since its launch back in ’08. We’re simply packaging this “winning combination” and providing it in a turnkey package for internal use by enterprises.

A little context: adding to our cloud portfolio

So how does this fit in with some of the other cloud solutions that we have announced? At a high-level, Dell is providing cloud solutions to help customers take either an evolutionary approach that makes their existing applications more efficient or a revolutionary approach with new applications written for cloud scale (we actually believe customers will do both).

We have already been working with Microsoft to offer evolutionary cloud services based on Microsoft’s Hyper V platform. We are now complementing this with a revolutionary Windows Azure appliance. This turnkey PaaS cloud platform will be in addition to the turnkey PaaS cloud platform that we announced with Joyent. Whereas the Joyent-based offering, “the Dell cloud solution for web applications” is targeted at folks developing in Java, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails etc. the Azure appliance will naturally be targeted at the .Net world. BTW we also offer solutions based on VMware Redwood/ Spring, EMC Atmos and BMC among others.

Stay tuned for more!

Extra-credit reading

Press release: Dell Expands Cloud Strategy and Services With Microsoft Windows Azure Platform Appliance
The Register: Why Microsoft took its cloud Private

Pau for now…

The Cloud is a marathon — Marten Mickos, Eucalyptus CEO

Barton George — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 04:21:04 +0000

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:

Talkin’ to Eucalyptus Founder & CTO — Rich Wolski
The Register article based on this interview: Ex-MySQL chief puts open source in its place

Pau for now…

Pics from Structure opening festivities

Barton George — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 06:09:01 +0000

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…

Chocolate covered servers?

Barton George — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 00:13:38 +0000

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…

Cloud Camp Austin 2010

Barton George — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 03:55:27 +0000

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…