Barton's Blog » cloud computing

Cloud Computing: A high-level how-to

Barton George — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 04:16:15 +0000

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

Extra credit reading

Dell in the Clouds website
Video 1: What is the Cloud?
Video 2: The Value of Cloud Computing
Whitepaper: Laying the Groundwork for Private and Public Clouds
Whitepaper: A Revolutionary Approach to Cloud Building

Pau for now…

The Value of Cloud Computing

Barton George — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 23:26:30 +0000

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
Hardware abstraction and the value it brings

Extra-credit reading

Whitepaper: Laying the Groundwork for Private and Public Clouds
Whitepaper: A Revolutionary Approach to Cloud Building
Animoto – The Poster Child for AWS & EC2

Pau for now…

What is the Cloud?

Barton George — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 14:37:04 +0000

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
We’ve only just begun

Pau for now…

Where Dell plays in the Cloud and how we got there

Barton George — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 02:38:15 +0000

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.

Extra-Credit reading

Dell Launches Public Cloud: Dell Cloud with VMware vCloud Datacenter Service – VMware cloud blog
New Dell delivers the cloud – IT in Canada

OSCON: ex-NASA cloud lead on his OpenStack startup, Piston

Barton George — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 03:09:11 +0000

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

Extra-credit reading

InformationWeek: OpenStack Founder’s Startup, Piston, Eyes Private Cloud Security
My blog: NASA’s chief cloud architect talks OpenStack

Pau for now…

My Cloud Expo preso: Taking the Revolutionary Approach

Barton George — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 22:37:09 +0000

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):

Pau for now…

Cloud Expo: Boomi case study — Enterprise Community Housing

Barton George — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 04:26:51 +0000

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.

Extra-credit reading

Cloud Expo: Talking to Rick Nucci, Boomi CTO

Pau for now…

Cloud Expo: Talking to Rick Nucci, Boomi CTO

Barton George — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 03:28:45 +0000

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.

Pau for now…

Intel Conversations in the Cloud: Dell’s “cloudy” thoughts

Barton George — Thu, 12 May 2011 03:31:42 +0000

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.

The episode is The Evolutionary approach to the cloud and is hosted by Allyson Klein, who manages the Server Technology and Software Strategy team in Intel’s Data Center Group. (You can also listen to it here)

Here are some of the things Allyson and I chat about:

0:35 My cloudy role at Dell
0:48 The Revolutionary approach: How Dell started out in the cloud four years ago at hyperscale
1:42 Taking this hyperscale experience to the “next 1000″
2:25 The Evolutionary approach: the path to the cloud that the vast majority of enterprises will take today
3:15 What drives the majority of business to the evolutionary approach to the cloud
5:35 Five years from now, how will we be talking about the cloud

Extra-credit reading

Power Managerment with Dell and VMware – Intel Cloud Builders Guide

Pau for now…

Savtira streams media and apps from the cloud with beefy PowerEdge C combo

Barton George — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 02:38:43 +0000

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

Pau for now…

Dell, Equinix and Rackspace launch Free OpenStack Demo environment

Barton George — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 12:00:31 +0000

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

OpenStack cloud operating system
Services and support from Rackspace Cloud Builders
Cloud optimized Dell PowerEdge C systems
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.

Try it, you just might like it

Extra-credit reading

OpenStack Installer Demo at SXSW

OpenStack heads into Interstellar Overdrive

Updated reading

Dell, Rackspace, and Equinix float free OpenStack test cloud – The Register

OpenStack Continues The Quest To Be “The Cloud Standard” – NetworkWorld

Three Vendors Team Up To Launch OpenStack Demos – Application Development Trends

OpenStack Demos at Equinix Will Traverse Clouds – Data Center Knowledge

OpenStack Continues The Quest To Be “The Cloud Standard” – Network World

Equinix, Dell, Rackspace Partner to Build OpenStack Cloud Demo Environments – The WHIR

Pau for now…

Dells Data Center Solutions group turns Four!

Barton George — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 17:53:46 +0000

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!

Extra-credit reading

Articles

InformationWeek: Dell Customers Combine Cloud Servers With Specialized Apps
The Register: Dell’s DCS is a big shiny server star
Data center knowledge: Dell Modular Facility Accelerates Deployment
PCWorld (IDG News) Willy Wonka and the Dell Factory
The Register: Dell lands custom gaming server deal/OnLive: ‘We don’t need no stinking consoles’
Information Week: Dell’s Data Center Unit Racking up Cloud Sales
InfoWorld: Dell plans new line of private cloud servers this year

DCS Whitepapers

Case studies

Uniserve (hoster): Dell Cloud Solution for Web applications

Uniserve video
InsiteExpress: Dell Cloud Solution for Data Analytics

Tier5 (hosting): Modular Data Center

Tier5 summary blog & video

OnLive (gaming): DCS custom win

iLand (cloud infrastructure): PowerEdge C6105

Live from World Hosting Days – AMD’s John Freuhe talks about the AMD based PowerEdge C systems

Barton George — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 03:32:44 +0000

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.
The PowerEdge C6145 our HPC monster machine

Take a listen as John walks you through the products and their use cases.

Extra-credit reading

Dell Launches Commercial Microservers – InformationWeek

Dell C-Series microservers pack in more compute nodes – v3 (UK)

Pau for now…

And on the other end of the spectrum — Microservers

Barton George — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 14:51:36 +0000

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.

Extra-credit reading:

Enter the Viking: Light Weight server for Hosting and Web 2.0

Back to the Future with Light Weight Servers

Pau for now…

Architecture Overview: The Dell Cloud Solution for Web Applications

Barton George — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 21:33:41 +0000

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.

Some of the areas Brian covers:

Purpose build hardware
Smart OSs
Smart machines
Self-service portal
Dell Support

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

White Paper: A Revolutionary Approach to Cloud Building

Barton George — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 21:44:59 +0000

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.

“A Revolutionary Approach to Cloud Building” consists of an upfront white paper and four related articles:

Intel Builds a Private Cloud — CIO Magazine
Cloud Computing: The Future of Application Architectures — CIO Magazine
How to Build a Hybrid Cloud Computing Strategy — Forrester’s James Staten
Cloud Computing Shopping List: 4 Key Ingredients — CIO Magazine

You say you want a Revolution

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 .

Pau for now..

My interview on the Windows Azure team blog — The Cloud will go away

Barton George — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 15:53:04 +0000

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.

Pau for now…

Low voltage DIMMs can mean huge savings in Hyperscale environments

Barton George — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 02:16:14 +0000

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.

Extra-credit reading:

PowerEdge C6105 case study: iland cloud infrastructure
PowerEdge C6105 spec sheet
Samsung Green Memory site

Pau for now…

Talking to NASA CTO about OpenStack Cloud Platform

Barton George — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 16:25:54 +0000

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

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

PowerEdge C powers OpenStack Install Fest

Barton George — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 15:51:12 +0000

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 5^th 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

Extra-Credit reading:

Pau for now…

The Importance of Supply Chain when Serving the Internet’s Cloudy Superstars

Barton George — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 14:51:50 +0000

Ironically when Dell, the company that built its success around supply chain management excellence, started the Data Center Solutions group to serve the “biggest of the big,” supply chain and procurement were just bit players.

I recently sat down with Chris Thompson who heads up the DCS supply chain and procurement organization and learned how this changed and the importance of his group in meeting the needs of this very unique customer set.

Some of the topics Chris tackles:

How his group helps customers get to revenue faster.
To what extent the DCS supply chain org is independent of Dell “normal” processes and procedures and to what extent it leverages them.
How has Chris’ group affected traditional Dell supply chain practices.

Extra credit reading:

Wanna learn more about the role that supply chain management plays in the success in of Dell’s Data Center Solutions group? Check out the article, Dell Retools Its Supply Chain for the Cloud, in this mornings Data Center Knowledge.

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

Pau for now…

Cloud gamers OnLive on working with Dell DCS

Barton George — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 03:10:36 +0000

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:

Onlive’s gaming cloud powered by custom Dell servers

Pau for now…

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

Barton George — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 16:55:22 +0000

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…

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

Barton George — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 22:16:29 +0000

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…

Meet OpenStack’s Community Manager

Barton George — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 03:31:18 +0000

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..