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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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:
Over the past week I have presented Dell’s thoughts and capabilities around cloud computing to several different groups from the U.S. military. In preparation for these talks I did some research into what’s happening in the wild and wonderful world of federal cloud computing. Here are a couple things that I found particularly interesting:
Psych!
In the past I have used the General Services Administration’s cloud RFQ issued last July, as an example of how the government is boldly sallying forth into the cloud. Turns out that in February they withdrew the RFQ saying basically that too much had changed since the RFQ was issued and that they need to regroup and get a solid view of the customer and market landscape before writing a new one.
Speaking of snags, Apps.gov which was launched last September as “an online technology supermarket for federal agencies” has not been the success that Federal CIO Vivek Kundra had hoped for. According to the WSJ, “concerns about compliance with security requirements and terms of service have prompted many agencies to bypass Apps.gov.”
But wait, there’s more
The above being said, the US government has a ton of cloud projects its working on. To get smart on the littany of efforts, check out the State of Public Sector Cloud Computing report that Vivek Kundra issued last week.
Stay tuned for my next entry that will talk about how the Military is “forging” ahead.
When I was out in the Bay Area for our launch I stopped by data warehouse and analytics player Greenplum. Greenplum is one of the first three members in our Cloud Partner program (the other two are Canonical and Aster Data.) I sat down with Greenplum’s President and founder Scott Yara to talk about the company and where they’re going:
Some to the topics Scott tackles:
Whats happening in the world of data.
How Greenplum began with the open source PostgreSQL database platform and over the last 7-8 years have refactored it and built a massively parallel database kernel engine.
How it works: Greenplum takes the data and physically distributes it across all the Database segments and operates on the data in parallel. This parallel approach allows Greenplum to process data 10-100x faster than conventional databases.
Who is using it: Skype, Fox Interactive, NTT docomo, Deutsche Bank, retailers, large healthcare companies.
The enterprise data cloud initiative – Setting a new type of analytics infrastructure that takes advantage of virtualization and the latest in general purpose and multi-core systems and is centered around self-service principles.
While a lot of folks are excited about writing apps to the iPhone, the platform that Scott and crew gest really excited about writing to are 2 socket Nehalem servers with a bunch of disk drives behind them.
How someone would go about getting started with Greenplum.
Last month when I was out in the Bay Area for our launch, I stopped by the offices of salesforce.com. I visited with some folks that I used to work with in a past life and then grabbed some time with Salesforce’s VP of product marketing, Sean Whiteley.
Here is what Sean had to say:
Some of the topics Sean tackles.
The idea behind salesforce.com (SFDC): In 1999 founders Marc Benioff and Parker Harris looked at Amazon and wondered why businesses couldn’t manage and get insight into their customers with the same ease as they interact with their favorite website.
Given that SFDC is built on a model of “multitenancy” how do they address security concerns when they are brought up.
Force.com: what it is and how it came about. Also the advent of AppExchange, where you can shop for applications that let you extend the cloud applications that you use to run your business.
What salesforce.com and Dell are doing together to address small and medium businesses: providing a business in a box, helping organizations focus on their core business rather than IT.
Last but not least in our tour of the first flight of servers in Dell’s PowerEdge C line is the C2100. This was filmed last month at our launch right after we closed down our whisper suite. Click below and join solutions architect Rafael Zamora as he leads you through the thrills, chills and spills of this cool new machine.
Spoiler Alert! A few Highlights
This machine is a great high performance data analytics and cloud optimized storage server. It’s perfect for use in conjunction with software from our Cloud ISV partners Joyent, Aster Data, Canonical or Greenplum.
The entire front can be jam-packed with disk drives for mega storage. You can get up to 24TB by loading twelve 3.5inch 2TB drives.
While the C2100 has same system board as the C1100, it comes with twice the real estate in a 2U form factor.
There’s even a platform for two additional drives that you can use for a bunch of different purposes such as separating production and non-production traffic.
As part of the CIO series we are doing with Information Week, I did a webinar on Wednesday called The Journey to the Cloud. If you want to get a feel for some of the big issues and ideas addressed during the webinar, check out moderator Fred Paul’s entertaining blog entry. Here is the deck I used:
If you’re interested in listening to the webinar you can get access to it here (you will need to register). I spent about 20 minutes on the presentation and 30 minutes fielding questions from the audience. One question submitted that we didn’t have time to answer was why Fred Paul and I both have first names for last names. That will have to wait for another webinar.
Our first Cloud white paper is now available and I’m really happy with the way it turned out. Being relatively new to Dell I didn’t know if I would be “compelled” to mention product in it or not but I’m happy to say that the paper focuses solely on the trends behind, and characteristics, of cloud computing . I want to give a big shout out to Intel who helped to fund this and also didn’t insist that we mention their products.
This first paper is a short and basic introduction to cloud computing. We are working on a follow-up that will pick up where this leaves off and dives deeper. Stay tuned.
If you’re wondering about the funky game show-like setting, I shot this after hours on the day of our launch in the whisper suite. Your guide, as before, is the incomparable Dell Solutions Architect, Rafael Zamora.
A few highlights
The C1100 is a high memory, cluster optimized, compute node
Dont let its slim pizza box looks fool you, upfront you can pack either four 3.5 inch drives or ten 2.5 inch drives.
For high memory optimized compute you can get 18 DIMM sticks for 144GB of RAM.
Comes with your choice of either Intel’s Nehalem or Westmere processors.
Raf also gives a couple of examples of recent customers and how they’ve decide to configure their units.
I recorded this interview with David Lang earlier this year and have been meaning to post it for the longest time. David is Dell’s program manager for federal security which means he is charge of the team that supports the security requirements for all Dell’s businesses that faces the federal government. He’s based in DC but I was able to grab a bit of his time when he was out visiting Austin.
David’s interesting background: he spent many years as a special agent in the air force doing computer and espionage investigations and how this lead him to the cloud.
How David addresses questions around cloud security and what type of environments you find in federal space.
The balancing act between availability, security and cost and where Homeland Security would want to use the public cloud.
I was recently in Las Vegas for Dell’s annual kick off where the sales force learns all about the cool products we have on tap. Not only were there tons of presentation sessions, there was a full expo area with both Dell and partner booths.
In the Cloud Infrastructure Solutions booth I got to act as the official “ShamWow” guy, giving our pitch (over and over and over).
I must have done the spiel literally 50 times over the three days. But the crowds were great so I wasn’t complaining (much ).
The Friday before last my boss Andy and I had a call with James Niccolai of IDG. We chatted about what we’ve been up to at Dell as well as teed up what we have in store for the near distant future.
To get the full scoop you should read the articles but here are some summary bits from the PCworld article:
The DCS [Data Center Solutions] unit was formed about three years ago to help Dell get more business from large Internet firms. Its engineers often spend several weeks on-site with those companies to design low-cost, low-power systems that meet the special requirements of their search, social networking and other Web applications.
That hands-on role means the DCS group designs servers only for large companies, such as Ask.com and Microsoft’s Azure division, which order tens of thousands of servers per year. But that’s about to change, Dell executives said in an interview.
Later this year Dell will turn some of those custom servers into standardized products and sell them to companies that order lower volumes of systems, including enterprises building “private cloud” environments in their data centers, and a second tier of smaller Internet companies.
“What we’ve found is, there are a whole bunch of other customers who want access to those designs but who are not buying in those types of quantities,” said Andy Rhodes, a director with Dell’s DCS group. “So the big thing we’re solving now, and we’ll talk more publically about over the next couple of months, is how to provide more of that capability to many, many more customers.”
Here is the second in my three part series on Virtualization and the cloud. Today’s entry focuses on the 800 pound gorilla in the virtualization space, VMware.
What VMware is seeing customers actually doing to take advantage of the cloud today both with regards to public and private clouds.
Some polling data he collected during his talk based on the ~300 folks who attended: 90-95% were virtualizing, 15% had an active private cloud project, 5-10% had a public cloud project. (This is pretty representative of what Dan’s generally seeing.)
The three phases of cloud:
Phase I: Standardizing and virtualizing an environment.
Phase II: Adopting private cloud from a management stand point: getting to self service and automation in terms of provisioning a new service/collapsing the time it takes to get a new image out to an end user or developer from weeks to minutes/ implementing charge back, dynamic capacity planning and management.
Phase III: Thinking about or planning how to leverage the public cloud in a fully compatible way.
A short history of VMware: how they’ve moved from desktop and server virtualization to VM management and optimization to enabling their platform for private clouds and public cloud providers.
Their “recent” acquisition of Spring Source and how it fits in.
Stay tuned next time for a summary of Gartner’s virtualization presentation from their data center conference.
Last month at the Interop/Web 2.0 I was able to drag Citrix’s Roger Klorese away from booth duty for an interview. Roger is a Sr. Director at Citrix who works on Xen server and the Essentials product family. Here is what he had to say:
Some of the topics Roger tackles
What Roger has been focusing on this year — Free Xen server. Launching the offering (there have been 200K downloads this year)and then bringing more features into it. What comes with it for free and what are add-ons that you get thru the Essentials family.
In the networking space Citrix announced a version of their netscaler app delivery server as a virtual appliance.
Managing “OPVs” (other people’s VM’s)
What Roger is most excited about:
Growing the datacenter into the cloud – Xen.org recently released the Xen cloud platform which is a full cloud distro, with a management stack based on open sourcing the Xen server stack.
Early next year they are releasing the Xen client type 1, a bare metal client hypervisor.
A couple of weeks ago I was in New York to visit customers and attend the co-located Interop and Web 2.0 events. One of the attendees/participants I got to know there was Joe Weinman, VP of ATT’s Business Solutions. Joe has been focusing a lot on the cloud lately so I thought I’d put down for posterity his thoughts and explanation of what ATT is up to in this space.
Some of the topics that Joe tackles:
ATT’s evolving strategy involves mix of managed endpoints and a variety of network services as well as a variety of services in the cloud.
ATT’s services range from infrastructure services like “Synaptic hosting,” storage as a service and compute as a service thru a variety of SaaS apps like unified comms and collaboration, SAP, Oracle ebiz suite, Seybold and JD Edwards.
They have a large platform as a service offering that is used by tens of thousands developers creating at mobile enterprise apps.
They target a wide variety of endpoints e.g. iphones,windows mobile devices, netbooks, black berries all the way thru tele-presence rooms.
How ATT delivers on both front end and back end architectures.
With today’s post, I’m right at the mid-point of my series of video interviews from Cloud Computing Expo. Today’s post offers a two-for-one special, Gluster CEO Hitesh Chellani along with Jack O’Brien who heads Gluster’s product management.
Some of the topics Hitesh and Jack tackle:
Gluster as a general-purpose open source cluster platform that runs on top of commodity hardware like Dell.
Their goal to transform the storage market the way Red Hat transformed the server market (Gluster employs a subscription model just like Red Hat).
What would you do after spending time at Lawrence Livermore National Labs putting together the second fastest super computer in the world? Hitesh thought he’d distill the experience and apply it to the storage space.
Some of the performance-driven verticals Gluster started out in.
The new hot area of virtual storage next to virtual servers.
Posted by Barton George 
(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.
