Here is the last in a series of three short videos around cloud computing put together by Dell and Intel. As I mentioned in the last two entries, these videos are part of larger series around key topics like IT reinvention, the consumerization of IT, social media etc.
This last video features myself, Dell’s former CIO Robin Johnson, VP of Dell’s Enterprise Solutions and Strategy, Praveen Asthana and Donna Troy, VP and GM of Solutions Marketing and Sales at Dell.
Some of the ground we cover
How we define cloud computing
How quickly can you evolve to cloud?
How do you balance your current environment with cloud
Starting your cloud building from a basis of virtualization
Before the holidays I posted the first of three videos that Dell and Intel put together around cloud computing. These videos are part of a larger series around key topics like IT reinvention, the consumerization of IT, social media etc.
This second video features myself, Dell’s VP of Platform marketing Sally Stevens and John Pereira, Intel’s director of data center and hosting.
Some of the ground we cover
Cloud as a component of a larger portfolio of compute models
Small companies and the power of the cloud (Animoto case study)
How much of IT spend goes towards maintenance and how can we lower this
Earlier this year Dell and Intel did a series of videos around key topics like cloud computing, IT reinvention, the consumerization of IT, social media etc. Within these there was a mini-series that dealt with cloud computing that I participated in.
Here is the first one that features Dell’s CIO Robin Johnson, John Pereira, Intel’s director of data center and hosting, Forrest Norrod who is the VP and GM of Dell’s server platform group and myself.
Some of the topics we hit on:
How cloud relates to grid compute
How start-ups and smaller companies leverage the cloud and how that may change as they grow
The benefit of velocity and near instantaneous deployment that cloud brings
The federal government’s “Cloud First” initiative and how that will promote adoption
One of the interviews I did at Dell World was a video with IT in Canada. I did the video with Paul Cooper, Dell’s country manager for Canada.
In the first half of the video I talk about how Dell got into the cloud and where we play in the space. In the second half Paul talks about the roll the telcos will play in the delivery of cloud services in Canada as well as issues around privacy and data sovereignty.
Check it out.
From the article itself, here’s a great summary of our cloud participation and shows how we have built, bought and partnered along the way:
Dell’s excursion into cloud began with organic development of server and data centre capability in specialized systems to meet the needs of large cloud providers (Facebook, Microsoft Azure and Bing), progressed through modification of these systems for marketing to the “next 1,000”, and shifted to partnership with software makers such as Joyent to develop complete cloud solutions, and with companies such as VMware for the creation of a full service public cloud offering.
Supporting acquisitions along the way include companies with specific capabilities such as SecureWorks, which was purchased to address web security concerns that continue to dog broader cloud adoption, and BOOMI, a specialist in cloud integration, which enables Dell to better service customers who adopt a hybrid cloud approach to sourcing compute resources.
Last week at OSCON in Portland, I dragged Josh McKenty away from the OpenStack one-year anniversary (that’s what Josh is referring to at the very end of the interview) to do a quick video. Josh, who headed up NASA’s Nebula tech team and has been very involved with OpenStack from the very beginning has recently announced Piston, a startup that will productize OpenStack for enterprises.
Here is what the always entertaining Josh had to say:
Some of the ground Josh covers:
What, in a nutshell, will Piston be offering?
Josh’s work at NASA and how got involved in OpenStack
Timing around Piston’s general release and GA
The roles he plays on the OpenStack boards
What their offering will have right out of the shoot and their focus on big data going forward
Last week Dell was out in force at the Cloud Computing Expo in New York as the event’s diamond sponsor. Besides the Keynote that President of Dell services Steve Schuckenbrock delivered, Dell also gave, or participated in 11 other talks.
I also gave one the talks and mine focused on the revolutionary approach to the cloud and talked about how this approach was setting a new bar for IT efficiency.
Here’s the deck:
(If the embedded deck doesn’t appear above, you can go to it directly on slideshare).
Talking with Press and Analysts
At the event I also met with press and analysts. One of the things I find helpful in explaining Dell’s strategy and approach to the cloud is to sketch it out for someone real time. I guess analysts Chris Gaun and Tony Iams of Ideas International found it helpful since they both tweeted a picture of it .
Besides analysts I also met with several individuals from the press. Mark Bilger, CTO of Dell services and I met with Michael Vizard of IT Business Edge and it resulted in the following article Cloud Computing Starts to Get a Little Foggy.
Additionally, to support the event and Dell’s cloud efforts going forward, Dell launched the Dell in the Clouds site. It’s pretty cool, you may just want to check it out.
Extra-credit reading (all my posts from Cloud Expo):
Earlier today at Cloud Computing Expo here in New York, Boomi CTO Rick Nucci conducted a session entitled “Cloud Integration: Best practices for IT Executives.” Rick did a great job sketching out the issues to consider and what to take into account with regards to integration. The most compelling part of the talk, however came from Pradip Sitaram, CIO of Enterprise Business Partners and Boomi customer. Enterprise is a not-for-profit that builds affordable housing across the U.S.
After Pradip got off stage I sat down with him and got him to give a condensed version of his talk:
Some of the ground Pradip covers:
Enterprise homes house over 1 million people and every 55 minutes somebody moves into an enterprise home.
Dealing with the financial and occupancy reports that come from over 1600 properties, on a daily, monthly and yearly basis. How Boomi provided a solution to dealing with and managing these reports that was a fraction of the quote from the other vendor, and could be implemented in weeks instead of months.
Their longer term issue of dealing with over 70 databases that are out dated and need to be modernized. The answer is to go to the cloud and Boomi will act as their strategic integration platform making sure that all the pieces old and new work together.
Today, day one of the Cloud Computing Expo kicked off here at the Javits center in New York city. The event began with a keynote delivered by Steve Schuckenbrock, president of Dell Services. Dell is the Diamond sponsor at the event and Steve talked about finding the real business value in cloud computing and the business of “Yes, now“.
Another of today’s speaker was the founder and CTO of Boomi, Rick Nucci. Boomi provides a SaaS-based cloud integration offering and was acquired by Dell about six months ago. After Rick finished his session I grabbed some time with him to learn more Boomi.
Some of the ground Rick covers:
What Boomi is and how it got started in the integration space back in 2000.
[01:05] How Boomi’s integration offering evolved from a traditional middleware approach to cloud-based.
[02:51] How being acquired by Dell has changed how Boomi run’s its business and serves its customers.
As a part of Intel’s Cloud Builder program, of which Dell is a member, Intel is hosting a podcast series appropriately entitled, Intel Conversations in the Cloud. The first vendor they featured in the series was Dell and, back in March, I had the honor of representing us.
Savtira Corporation, who provides outsourced Cloud Commerce solutions, has chosen Dell DCS’s PowerEdge C line of servers and solutions to deliver streamed media and apps from the cloud. Dell’s gear will help power the Savtira Cloud Commerce platform and Entertainment Distribution Network (EDN).
With a little help from PowerEdge C, businesses will now be able to use EDN to stream all digital media (business apps, games, music, movies audio/ebooks) from the cloud to any device. One of the particularly cool features is, since the state and configuration are cloud-based, consumers can switch between devices and pick up exactly where they pushed pause on the last device.
Talk about supercharging
To power Savtira’s EDN data center, the company picked PowerEdge C410xs packed with NVidia Tesla M2070 GPUs and driven by PowerEdge C6145s. If you think GPUs are just for rendering first-person shooters, think again. GPUs can also cost-effectively supercharge your compute-intensive solution by offloading a lot of the processing from the main CPUs. According to NVidia, for 1/10 the cost and with only 1/20 of the power consumption, GPUs deliver the same performance as CPUs.
To help you get an idea of the muscle behind this solution, the PowerEdge C410x PCIe expansion chassis holds up to 16 of the Tesla M2070s GPUs, each of which exceeds over 400 cores. Two fully populated C410xs are in turn powered by one PowerEdge C6145 for a combined total of 33 Teraflops in just 7U.
Talk about a lot of power in a little space
Extra-credit reading
PowerEdge C6145 — Dell DCS unveils its 4th HPC offering in 12 months, and its a beefy one
PowerEdge C410x — Say hello to my little friend — packing up to 16 GPGPUs
NVIDIA: from gaming graphics to High Performance Computing
OpenStack, the open source cloud platform based on code donated by NASA and Rackspace, has gained considerable traction since it was launched eight months ago. The community has rapidly grown and there have been several releases. Now its time to get potential customers trying it out and kicking the tires.
With the idea of removing friction to adoption and make the testing out of the platform as easy as possible, Dell, Equinix and Rackspace are announcing today the availability of a free OpenStack cloud demonstration and test environment.
The idea of the demo environment is to allow organizations to easily evaluate OpenStack and assess application performance on the platform in a low risk environment for free. The next step after a successful demo would be a proof of concept.
Movin workloads around the country
This demo environment is initially available in three U.S. data centers and in Q2 of this year this offering will also be available in Equinix data centers in Europe and Asia. The initial data centers are:
Equinix Silicon Valley
Equinix Asburn, VA
Rackspace Chicago
By having geographically dispersed facilities customers are able to test out the moving of applications and workloads between them.
The various parts
The OpenStack demo environment is made up of the following components
Platform Equinix, a global delivery platform of 92 network neutral data centers in 35 metro markets
Widening the circle
The name of the game here is making the trying out of OpenStack as easy as possible. There are a lot of community members and open source aficionados who are already testing out OpenStack. The idea with OpenStack cloud demonstration environment is to provide a set up where a greater number of organizations feel comfortable evaluating the platform for themselves.
Dell’s Data Center Solutions group (DCS) is no longer a toddler. Over the weekend we turned four!
Four years ago on March 27, 2007 Dell announced the formation of the Data Center Solutions group, a special crack team designed to service the needs of hyperscale customers. On that day eWeek announced the event in their article Dell Takes On Data Centers with New Services Unit and within the first week Forrest Norrod, founding DCS GM and currently the GM of Dell’s server platform division, spelled out to the world our goals and mission (in re-watching the video its amazing to see how true to that mission we have been):
The DCS Story
If you’re not familiar with the DCS story, here is how it all began. Four years ago Dell’s Data Center Solutions team was formed to directly address a new segment that begin developing in the marketplace, the “hyperscale” segment. This segment was characterized by customers who were deploying 1,000s if not 10,000s of servers at a time.
These customers saw their data center as their factory and technology as a competitive weapon. Along with the huge scale they were deploying at, they had a unique architecture and approach specifically, resiliency and availability were built into the software rather than the hardware. As a result they were looking for system designs that focused less on redundancy and availability and more on TCO, density and energy efficiency. DCS was formed to address these needs.
Working directly with a small group of customers
From the very beginning DCS took the Dell direct customer model and drove it even closer to the customer. DCS architects and engineers sit down with the customer and before talking about system specs they learn about the customer’s environment, what problem they are looking to solve and what type of application(s) they will be running. From there the DCS team designs and creates a system to match the customer’s needs.
In addition to major internet players, DCS’s customers include financial services organizations, national government agencies, institutional universities, laboratory environments and energy producers. Given the extreme high-touch nature of this segment, the DCS group handles only 20-30 customers worldwide but these customers such as Facebook, Lawrence Livermore National Labs and Microsoft Azure are buying at such volumes that the system numbers are ginormous.
Expanding to the “next 1000”
Ironically because it was so high-touch, Dell’s scale out business didn’t scale beyond our group of 20-30 custom customers. This meant considerable pent up demand from organizations one tier below. After thinking about it for a while we came up with a different model to address their needs. Leveraging the knowledge and experience we had gained working with the largest hyperscale players, a year ago we launched a portfolio of specialized products and solutions to address “the next 1000.”
The foundation for this portfolio is a line of specialized PowerEdge C systems derived from the custom systems we have been designing for the “biggest of the big.” Along with these systems we have launched a set of complete solutions that we have put together with the help of a set of key partners:
Dell Cloud Solution for Web Applications: A turnkey platform-as-a-service offering targeted at IT service providers, hosting companies and telcos. This private cloud offering combines Dell’s specialized cloud servers with fully integrated software from Joyent.
Dell Cloud Solution for Data Analytics: A combination of Dell’s PowerEdge C servers with Aster Data’s nCluster, a massively parallel processing database with an integrated analytics engine.
Dell | Canonical Enterprise Cloud, Standard Edition: A “cloud-in-a-box” that allows the setting up of an affordable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas)-style private clouds in computer labs or data centers.
OpenStack: We are working with Rackspace to deliver an OpenStack solution later this year. OpenStack is the open source cloud platform built on top of code donated by Rackspace and NASA and is now being further developed by the community.
These first four years have been a wild ride. Here’s hoping the next four will be just as crazy!
This week, outside of Frankfurt, WorldHostingDays is taking place. A whole delegation of folks from the Data Center Solutions group is there to support the announcement of our new microserver line. A lot of our key partners are there as well. One such partner is AMD.
Earlier today, AMD director of product marketing John Fruehe held a session entitled “Core Scalability in a cloud environment.” Above is a three minute section where John talks about the three AMD-based systems that are part of the PowerEdge C line:
The PowerEdge C5125 microserver which we announced yesterday
The PowerEdge C6105 optimized for performance per watt per dollar.
Monday I wrote about the announcement of our mega-beefy, 96-core PowerEdge C6145 server, specifically geared to customers solving big problems involving huge and complex data sets in mapping, visualization, simulations and rendering.
At the other end of the spectrum however are customers, such as those offering low-end dedicated hosting solutions, who are looking for systems with only enough processing and storage to serve up straight-forward, focused applications such as those for serving up webpages, streaming video etc. These “right-sized” systems are referred to as “micro” or “light weight” servers.
Take a listen to Data Center Solutions marketing director Drew Schulke below as he explains the origin of the microserver and walks you through our second generation offering in this space.
Some of the area Drew covers:
How did Dell get into the microserver market 2-3 years ago
How the progression of Moore’s law caused processing power to out strip the needs of many applications.
A walk through of our second generation microserver which packs 12 single socket servers into one 3Uenclosure.
We will continue to be making noise in this space. Be sure to tune in next time as our topic will be a mini “case study” on Dell’s first generation microserver deployed at a large hoster in France.
Last November, Dell announced the Dell Cloud Solution for Web Applications. This turnkey offering is composed of Dell systems and Joyent Software along with a reference architecture all supported by Dell services. This solution enables a private Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment to support the development and testing of languages such as PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby and Java.
This solution is designed for hosters and telcos who are looking to provide public PaaS offerings. An example of this is Uniserve, a Canadian Internet services provider. Uniserve has adopted the Dell Cloud Solution for Web Applications to offer on-demand access to a high-performance Internet application and consumer delivery platform, for customers to develop iPhone apps to commercial storefronts, to hosting and delivering Software-as-a-Service.
Check out the short video above where Dell Data Center Solutions architect Brian Harris provides a high level overview of the Dell Cloud Solution for Web Applications architecture.
A while ago, as a follow-up to our white paper “Laying the Groundwork for Private and Public Clouds” Dell and Intel worked with CIO magazine to put together a Tech Dossier that picked up where our previous paper left off.
Here are a few paragraphs from the white paper to whet your appetite:
For many enterprises, building a private cloud is simply the next step on an evolutionary path that began with data center consolidation. When a company has established a strong virtualization underpinning and is working with traditional enterprise applications, an evolutionary approach to the private cloud makes perfect sense…
In some instances, however, taking what Dell refers to as a “revolutionary” approach to private clouds will be more efficient and much more appropriate. The revolutionary approach makes use of “new world” applications that are written for and deployed in the cloud. These cloud-native applications are designed from the ground up for greater scalability and use across a multitude of servers…
The revolutionary approach requires a new way of thinking about the cloud, but one that Van Mondfrans says enterprise IT executives should undertake sooner rather than later. “This is where the application paradigm is going,” he says…
You can access the document here (no registration required .
Earlier this month an interview I did with Robert Duffner, Director of Product management for Windows Azure, went live on the Windows Azure team blog. Robert asked me a variety of questions about Cloud security, how I see the Cloud evolving, the pitfalls of the cloud, where Dell plays etc.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that my ramblings actually turned out coherent Here is a section from the interview (you can check out the whole piece here):
Cloud computing is a very exciting place to be right now, whether you’re a customer, an IT organization, or a vendor. As I mentioned before, we are in the very days of this technology, and we’re going to see a lot happening going forward.
In much the same way that we really focused on distinctions between Internet, intranet, and extranet in the early days of those technologies, there is perhaps an artificial level of distinction between virtualization, private cloud, and public cloud. As we move forward, these differences are going to melt away, to a large extent.
That doesn’t mean that we’re not going to still have private cloud or public cloud, but we will think of them as less distinct from one another. It’s similar to the way that today, we keep certain things inside our firewalls on the Internet, but we don’t make a huge deal of it or regard those resources inside or outside as being all that distinct from each other.
I think that in general, as the principles of cloud grab hold, the whole concept of cloud computing as a separate and distinct entity is going to go away, and it will just become computing as we know it.
Dell’s Data Center Solutions (DCS) group focuses on customers operating huge scaled out environments. Given the number of systems deployed in these environments we are always looking for ways to take energy out of our systems. A half a watt here, a half a watt there means big energy savings when multiplied across a hyper scale environment and translates into lower costs to our environment and to our customers’ operating budgets.
Recently we have adopted Samsung’s low voltage DIMMs (“Green DDR3″) in our efforts to drive efficiencies. Take a listen to DCS’s Executive Director of engineering and architecture, Reuben Martinez, in the video below as he walks you through how a seemingly small decrease in DIMM voltage can translate to millions of dollars of savings in hyper scale environments.
Some of the ground Reuben covers:
How much energy US data centers consume and how this has grown.
What is happening to the cost of energy (hint: its going up:).
How our PowerEdge C6105 is designed for power efficiency including utilizing Samsung’s low-voltage memory. (BTW, Samsumg’s Green DDR3′s are also available in our C1100, C2100 and C6100)
The amount of power consumed by memory compared to the CPU (you may be surprised)
[2:35] The TCO calculation that shows the savings that low voltage DIMMs can provide in a typical data center environment.
One of the featured speakers during the kick off of the OpenStack design summit yesterday was NASA CTO of IT, Chris Kemp. OpenStack is an open source cloud platform and the compute side of the project is based on code from NASA’s Nebula cloud.
I got some time with Chris and learned about NASA’s involvement in the project:
Some of the ground Chris covers:
Nebula and the cloud computing platform code base
NASA’s huge data needs and what they do with the data
Serendipity: NASA’s cloud engine + Rackspace’s file system engine
How NASA is working with the project: a two-way street
Yesterday morning I made the drive down to San Antonio for OpenStack’s second design summit (and first open to the public). If you’re not familiar with OpenStack, its an open source cloud platform founded on contributed code from Rackspace and NASA’s Nebula cloud. The project was kicked off back in July at an inaugural design summit held in Austin.
The project has picked up quite a bit of momentum in its first four months. Attending this week’s 4-day conference are close to 300 people, representing 90 companies, from 12 countries. The event is broken into a business track and design track (where actual design decisions are being made and code is being written).
Powering the Install Fest
For the project Dell has sent down a bunch of PowerEdge C servers which have been set-up upstairs on the 5th floor. OpenStack compute has been installed on the two racks of servers and are up and running. Tomorrow, coders will get access to these systems during the install fest. During the fest attendees will each be given a virtual machine on the cloud to test and learn about installing and deploying OpenStack to the cloud.
I got Bret Piatt, who handles Technical Alliances for OpenStack, to take me on a quick tour of the set-up. Check it out:
Featuring: Brett Piatt, PowerEdge C1100, C2100, C6100 and C6105
Posted by Barton George 
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