Yesterday, the announcement went out that the Dell | Canonical Enterprise Cloud, Standard Edition was out and ready for consumption. What this cloud-in-a-box allows folks to do is to set-up affordable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas)-style private clouds in their computer labs or data centers. The cool thing is that, because the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) software is compatible with Amazon Web Services EC2 and S3 services, it enables IT admins and developers to move workloads between public and private clouds.
Who cares?
Application developers and IT service providers and admins who are setting up cloud POC’s are perfect candidates for this pre-configured testing and development environment. With regards to industries, areas where there is a lot of software development work like Hosters, Telco & Communications, Media & Entertainment and Web 2.0 businesses are prime markets for the Dell UEC solution.
So what’s in it?
The solutions’ basic components are Dell PowerEdge C systems plus a Dell-specific download of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (made up of the Ubuntu operating system and the Eucalyptus platform for private cloud computing). To simplify getting the whole shebang up and running Dell and Canonical are providing the following:
Walrus Controller (W) – the cloud’s storage repository
Cluster Controller (CC) – the controller for a up to 1024 compute cores grouped together as a cluster
Storage Controller (SC) – the controller for cluster’s storage repository
Compute Node (CN) – cloud’s compute node
And on the support side…
If you’re looking for systems management and support services with your order, you are in luck. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has put together UEC Assist, a support service built specifically for Dell customers deploying SE Edition and which is delivered by Canonical’s Global Services and Support team.
Its all about efficiency
From a Dell DCS (the group at Dell behind this) point of view, this offering fits in well with our strategy of bringing total solutions to market that optimize efficiency at every layer, from code to servers to storage. The open source Dell UEC solution is tailor made to deliver a ready to go IaaS solution.
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.
Joyent has been a provider of cloud services for the past five years, longer than the term cloud itself has been around. Today at a press conference in San Francisco, Dell announced the availability of the Dell Cloud Solution for Web Applications which offers the software from Joyent as a turnkey platform-as-a-service offering. This private cloud offering is offered on Dell’s specialized cloud servers and is targeted at IT service providers, hosting companies and telcos.
Up and running
One of the first customers to pick up and run with this offering 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.
Thoughts from the top
Joyent CEO, David Young is featured in the short video above addressing the following questions about the Dell/Joyent solution:
Today at a press conference in San Francisco we announced the general availability of our Dell cloud solutions. One of the solutions we debuted was the Dell Cloud Solution for Data Analytics, a combination of our PowerEdge C servers with Aster Data’s nCluster, a massively parallel processing database with an integrated analytics engine.
Earlier this week I stopped by Aster Data‘s headquarters in San Carlos, CA and met up with their EVP of marketing, Sharmila Mulligan. I recorded the video above where Sharmila discusses the Dell and Aster solution and the fantastic results a customer is seeing with it.
Some of the ground Sharmila covers:
What customer pain points and problems does this solution address (hint: organizations trying to manage huge amounts of both structured and unstructured data)
How Aster’s nCluster software is optimized for Dell PowerEdge C2100 and how it provides very high performance analytics as well as a cost effective way to store very large data.
(2:21) InsightExpress, a leading provider of digital marketing research solutions, has deployed the Dell and Aster analytics solution and has seen great results:
Up and running w/in 6 weeks
Queries that took 7-9 minutes now run in 3 seconds
Yesterday morning at the Web 2.0 summit out in San Francisco I sat in a session led by RackSpace‘s CTO John Engates. After the session finished I grabbed some time with John to learn more about his thoughts on OpenStack, the open source cloud platform that Rackspace, along with NASA helped kick off.
Some of the ground John covers:
How OpenStack directly addresses some of the most common reservations people have about the cloud.
The beginning of this week I attended the Web 2.0 summit out in San Francisco. Dell was a sponsor and it turned out to be a great event with speakers like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Robin Li founder of Baidu, Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley, Eric Schmidt of Google and the list goes on.
While at the conference I ran into Social Media guru, author and founder of the Altimeter group, Charlene Li. I was able to grab sometime with Charlene and get her thoughts on a few topics. Here is the result:
Some of the ground Charlene covers:
How social media efforts are transitioning from tools and tactics to a strategic and holistic approach.
(3:01) Charlene’s thoughts on Monday’s Facebook announcement (Facebook Messages) and what she finds most interesting about the move
(4:22) What Charlene thinks of Dell’s social media efforts, what have we done well and where can we improve.
Last week, Tier5 who has taken over an old Mitsubishi facility in Adelaide was the first company globally to deploy Dell’s third generation Modular Data Center. Tier5 is an eight-person start up that is turning the former auto plant into a state-of-the-art data center park to be leased by wholesale tenants including managed service providers, resellers and large users.
Instead of building out a traditional data center Tier5 went with Dell’s Modular Data Center (MDC) which snaps together like ginormous Legos allowing systems to be up and running in as little as a week. The MDC’s modular nature also allows capacity to be added incrementally as needed.
For a great overview, check out the short video that ITNews did at the opening press conference on Tuesday.
Hand-in-hand
To get Tier5 exactly what they wanted Dell’s DCS team worked collaboratively with the Tier5 engineers over a period of nine to 10 months to nail down the exact specs. As Tier5 founder Marty Gauvin said, “Our engagement with Dell DCS was enormously collaborative. We were able to achieve our objectives in a very collaborative way, and then go beyond them.”
So what is this thing?
The shell of Dell’s MDC solution is formed by a steel frame, rather than a standard rigid shipping container. As a result of this design, Dell can deploy modules with different configurations to meet the needs of different customers. Each module houses up to 12 standard server racks and up to 2,500 servers. The design gives Tier5 the flexibility to mix and match hardware components within a module to better serve the specific needs of its customers.
The MDC solution contains two rows of custom-built racks with a center hot aisle, a design that allows easy access to components for servicing and maintenance. The module offers an easily accessible connection point for power and cooling as well as IT management. It also offers multiple cooling options, including chilled water, evaporative cooling and outside air. This enables users to choose the cooling option that works best for the site and the climate.
Keepin’ it green
Besides allowing Tier5 to be agile and not having to tie up capital until right before its needed, the MDC also saves on a tremendous amount of power. Tier5 estimates a best in class power usage efficiency (PUE) of 1.18 for the Adelaide modular data center. This in turn will result in their customers saving approximately AUD $8 million in power costs per year.
Where to next?
So the first third-generation Dell MDC has surfaced down under. Stay tuned to see where in the world the next one will pop up.
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.
Earlier this week Dell held an industry analyst summit in Boston. The event, “Dell Services and Solutions for the Virtual Era” was attended by analysts from around the world and was a follow-on to the event Dell held in San Francisco back in March.
Please take your seats, the summit is about to begin.
What went on
The two-day event featured presentations from Dell’s senior leadership, customer and partner panels, break out sessions and 1:1′s between analysts and Dell subject matter experts. The first day also culminated with a solutions expo and dinner held at the very cool Institute of Contemporary Art.
What were the key messages?
The high-level messages that Dell kept reiterating were:
We are executing on our strategy of delivering solutions that are open, capable and affordable which ultimately give our customers the power to do more.
We are undergoing a fundamental change in the way we’re approaching our customers. We are moving away from transactional selling motions toward a more consultative approach.
Right before the guests arrive. The solutions expo and dinner.
How was it received?
It will be interesting to see the reports that are generated from this week’s summit but we did receive some very positive tweets during the event (check out the whole twitter feed from the event):
Conclusion from [Dell Analyst Summit]: Dell 2.0 has arrived. We’ve called it 1.x to date. No longer. They’ve cracked the “solutions” code — Jonathan Eunice, Illuminata
Dell’s vision is quite clear and lingo shows detachment from manufacturer approach – openness remains as a mantra — Giorgio Nebuloni, IDC
Dell talking solution accelerators. Didn’t hear this message from them a few yrs ago. Highlights strengths of Perot & Dell 2gether — Tim Sheedy, Forrester
Great session with Dell Health IT team. Great progress and compelling positioning in the space. Good prog telling a sngl story — Crawford Del Prete, IDC
Updated 11/04
Here are interviews I did with two of the analysts who attended the summit:
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).
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
Today Rackspace and NASAannounced 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.
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.
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.
Whether you believe in the Cloud or not, it’s coming. That being said it’s not a phenomenon that will fill skies of IT departments tomorrow, but rather it is starting out as another tool in IT’s bag of tricks. As time passes, cloud computing will increasingly become a greater part of the portfolio of compute models that IT departments manage, sitting alongside Traditional computing and Virtualization.
Cloud Computing Today
If you were to graph the distribution of compute models being used today by IT departments in large enterprises, it would look something like the chart below. Today, traditional computing and virtualization are where most of the distribution lies with a little bit of flirting with the Public Cloud in the case of SaaS applications for areas like HR, CRM, email etc. Private cloud is presently negligible.
Over the next three to five years
Over the next three to five years the above distribution will flatten out and shift to the right and will resemble the graph below. Private cloud will represent the largest compute model utilized but it will be equally flanked by virtualization and public cloud. You’ll notice there will still be a decent amount of resources that remain in the traditional compute bucket representing applications that are not worth the effort of rewriting or converting to a cloud platform.
Evolutionary Vs. Revolutionary
One of the things to note with this new distribution is that the lines between Virtualization and Private Cloud will start to blur (there will also be a blurring between Private and Public clouds as hybrid clouds become more of a reality in the future, but that’s another story for another time). There are two ways to go about setting up private clouds, evolutionary and revolutionary.
Tune in tomorrow and learn more about these two approaches and how they differ.
My favorite cosmonaut-coder Mark Shuttleworth stopped by our offices this morning for a visit. Mark is the founder of both the Linux distribution Ubuntu and its commercial sponsor Canonical. Mark and I sat down in the lobby and caught up. Here is a short interview we recorded.
The 10.4 Ubuntu release Lucid Lynx and what to expect: a strong cloud focus on the enterprise side and a lot of shiny new bling on the desktop as well as making the desktop “social” (e.g. Tweet straight from your desktop)
What Ubuntu is doing in the Netbook space
What excites Mark the most in technology today and why cloud is like HTTP in the early 90′s
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.”
There was a good article in Information Week last week with our GM, Forrest Norrod. Forrest talked to Charlie Babcock about the success that Dell’s Data Center Systems unit has had in the cloud space.
You should check out the whole article but here are a few bits I’ve pulled out for your reading pleasure:
Dell’s Data Center Solutions unit, has only 20 customers, but would be the third largest supplier of x86 servers in the U.S. if it were split out from Dell, said Forrest Norrod, the unit’s VP and general manager, in an interview. The only companies ahead it in shipping Intel or AMD servers would be HP and Dell itself.
This foray into cloud computing is somewhat contrary to Dell’s previous pattern of applying sophisticated supply chain logistics to well-worn grooves in the business and consumer computing markets. For one thing, Dell, until recently, hasn’t talked about it. For another, it’s built a business unit that refuses to address the mass market at all.
Norrod acknowledged what other Dell officials said as well: the lessons learned in producing servers for the big Internet service providers will be used when enterprise customers knock on Dell’s door to discuss how to build out their private clouds. “Dell will bring the capabilities from DCS to the mass market,” he said
“Interest [in private cloud computing] is spiking through the roof,” [Norrod] said, and he predicted most new enterprise applications will be designed to run in the cloud, whether public or private. Such applications are built with scalability in mind and can take advantage of the ability of the cloud to generate more virtual machines on demand.
They say turn around is fair play. Kevin Hazard of the Planet recently took this literally. No sooner had I finished interviewing him at the Cloud Expo in Santa Clara then he turned around and pointed his camera at me. He got me talking about the cloud and what the heck Dell’s doing in it.
Some of the topics I tackle:
What I do as Dell’s Cloud Evangelist.
Where Dell plays in the cloud:
Cloud based services providing IT management as a service.
Building these capabilities through the acquisition of four companies over the last two years: MessageOne, ASAP, Everdream and Silverback.
Creating custom servers as well as providing data center design and implementation for some of the world’s largest “hyper-scale” customers e.g. Microsoft’s Azure and three out of the top five search engines in the U.S.
What’s next: building on this experience to offer integrated cloud solutions for setting up private and public clouds. Combining Dell hardware and services with best of breed software — all coming from/supported by Dell.
My thoughts on Public vs. Private clouds and how we will end up with a mix of computing models.
Posted by Barton George 
