Data Center

Dell recently had a big showing in San Francisco for vmworld 2009. We had quite a few of our people out there as my colleague Andrew Gilman wrote about here, showing off our capabilities and making some pretty cool announcements.

From a services perspective, there are some interesting virtualization initiatives underway at Dell as well. Dell ProConsult services help customers dramatically simplify their IT infrastructure, reduce operating costs and freeing up resources for new business initiatives -- especially in the area of virtualization. While virtualization is often seen as a panacea, unless it is planned and managed correctly, it can create more problems than it solves.

In order to help customers streamline and optimize virtualization planning and deployment, Dell will expand use of PlateSpin Recon to provide Virtualization Readiness Assessments and PlateSpin Migrate for Rapid Deployment Services. PlateSpin is the first data center workload profiling, analysis and planning tool to combine consolidation planning with virtual capacity management.

The goal for using these tools is to help save companies OPEX and accelerate the savings through the use of a single Workload Management solution that spans that data center including multiple hypervisors and operating systems, as well as physical and virtual workloads.

It is through these partnerships and expanded services offerings that we continue our vision to simplify our customer's IT infrastructures.

I’m getting down to the end of the videos I recorded last month at Cloud World/Open Source World and I’ve saved some of the best for last.  My penultimate interview is with Michael Crandell, CEO of Right Scale.

Right Scale, based in sunny Santa Barbara California, makes a cloud management platform that provides greater control over the cloud and makes it easy for companies to begin to migrate applications to the cloud or start building new ones there.  See what Michael has to say…

Some of the stuff Michael discusses:

• Right Scale focuses on three things: 1) Automation, 2) Providing a library of cloud ready solutions, 3) doing all this in an open and transparent way that allows portability among cloud platforms.
• How Right Scale came to be.  Their founder was teaching a class at UCSB about how to build an ecommerce site.  Amazon granted him some free compute time to use in his class.  He realized he needed a framework for managing and monitoring the classes usage, he also realized there was a business to built around this idea…
• Where Right Scale will be putting its efforts in the up coming year:
  • Supporting more cloud platforms as the come online
  • Increasing their partner program and their cloud-ready solutions
  • Increasing support for enterprise level editions and features e.g. security and compliance, user control, billing, metering…

Extra-Credit reading:

• Right Scale part 1: Mickos joins and control moves up the stack
• Right Scale part 2: Why the Cloud?  Apple Fanboys and server suffrage

Pau for now…

I never feel like I get enough sleep … fighting to get six to seven solid hours in every night. However, my stresses are NOTHING compared to the noise and pressure IT admins, CIOs and CTOs deal with. Just look at our industry. From what I’ve read and learned so far, it seems Cisco and HP want customers to rip out their current hardware, software and solutions, and start “fresh” with their Unified Computing System (UCS) and BladeSystem Matrix offerings. Correct me if I’m wrong about that, but I still have to ask -- what’s their motivation? Think about it, why would they insist on something so disruptive especially in a time when customers are fighting to thrive with restricted budgets?

The bottom line in my opinion is this: locking your company into an infrastructure means a locked-in revenue stream for the provider and lack of choice and flexibility for you.

This is incredibly frustrating. It shouldn’t be novel to do the right thing for customer FIRST and make money second. Folks are dealing with legacy hardware and limited budgets (in most cases) with an intense desire to virtualize and do something called “the cloud,” whatever that means to them. That’s enough to digest without having to consider that everything they’ve done up to this point might have been a waste of time and money.

Dell thinks there’s another way, a way where you don’t have to eat your own young to thrive and stay competitive.

First, we’re open. We’ve figured out how to get you where you’re going, specifically with virtualization, using most of what you’ve already invested in.

Second, we’re pragmatic. (pause for smirk on overused marketing word) We give you answers to IT problems now, today, just in case you don’t feel like waiting on promises that no one has proven or deployed.

Finally, we’re end-to-end. We already offer first class products at each step of the fully virtualized solution, including servers, storage, networking, desktop and the cloud, instead of specializing in only one part of the data center and trying our hand at new businesses.

This week at VMworld, we announced two new partnerships that strengthen our open, pragmatic and end-to-end approach. Brocade expands its 10-year relationship with the Dell family to provide enhanced leadership of next-generation data center networking with 10/40/100GbE, Security, iSCSI, FCoE and Converged Enhanced DCB Ethernet. These are in addition to our Brocade FC switches.

But we’re covering more than just the networking side of investment protection. We’re also partnering with Scalent Systems to make heterogeneous, virtualized environments portable for easier disaster recovery and higher availability. Now, you’ll no longer have to redefine your physical storage and network connections each time you need to move whole hypervisors, physical applications, workloads or virtual machines (VM). All of this can be done NOW with your existing technologies and future flexibility to purchase and use what you need to customize your infrastructure.

This is just the beginning. Folks like The Register, eWeek and ChannelWeb are already talking, and we’ll hit the streets a few times this fall with more info. In the meantime, ask some hard questions. The next time you find yourself sitting in the big, leather chair being entertained by the “latest and greatest” buzz solution, make sure it doesn’t end up stinging you.

I spent a day at this year's Smart Healthcare show in London's Earl's court. I've been going for more years than I can remember - I've spent  almost 15 years in healthcare IT. For me, it's a great opportunity to see the latest products and solutions from hundreds of healthcare ICT suppliers. I'm always looking for ways I can innovate to help NHS Northamptonshire improve the patient care experience - and that includes looking for ways to free up funds to do this. 

Our aim is to be the best Primary Healthcare Trust (PCT) in the East Midlands - so we need to do as much as we can with the funds we have.  Normally at Smart Healthcare I am a bit of a spectator. But this year, I had the opportunity to talk about how we're cutting our energy costs by about 25% each year and reducing carbon footprint by approximately 121 tonnes per year (equivalent to the output of 39 cars) with a customised datacentre solution from Dell and APC.

The impetus to this solution was moving to a new headquarters. We thought: how could we more effectively run our IT systems so we can divert more money towards improving patient care? Our answer: cutting total cost of ownership in the datacentre so the PCT can devote more funds to local services. And by doing this, we also help the trust meet government targets on reducing carbon emissions.

After my presentation, I spoke to a journalist about the new datacentre and he asked me why we needed eight terabytes of storage space. I told him about how the PCT analyses the different healthcare needs of the region- what we term trending. To ensure that we are investing in the right areas of patient care in the right areas of the region, we are reducing investment in areas where there is not such a big need. For example, some towns have a higher proportion of smokers than others, we want to ensure we are focusing most of our anti-smoking programmes there rather than in other parts of the region where there are fewer smokers.

So, the datacentre plays a vital function in helping the PCT achieve its goal to provide the best possible healthcare services for nearly 700,000 people living in the East Midlands.

In the 2002 movie, Minority Report, Police Chief John Anderton, played by Tom Cruise, manipulates data and images on massive computer screens to prevent crimes before they happen in the "pre-crime" department. Pretty cool concept and compelling visuals. 

Imagine if you could enter a virtual data center and manipulate 3D images to create the most power-efficient, cost effective data center for your business. Now you can do it, and its

not science fiction with an interactive Web experience. Enter the Intel Dell Data Center 360 Tour- a new website from Dell and Intel that let's you walk through various ways to get more out of your data center. 

Recently there has been expansive growth in data centers to keep pace with the need for data management and the demands of an ever-more connected workforce. With this growth comes the increased need for electricity and space, which pose environmental, energy and economic challenges that IT must solve within the data center environment. Optimizing the data center forces a business's IT department to make important decisions about which technology they wish to deploy in their data centers. As a result of these new business problems, now - more than ever - IT has been charged with maximizing the value of the most expensive real estate in their corporation: their data center.

Take a virtual walk through our new website to learn ways to address the most pressing topics: power and cooling, virtualization, server strategy, new and emerging technologies, and data center management. The virtual tour not only lets you explore the data center, but to take a deep-dive into its components and gain a full understanding of how they function within the larger system. We've included tools like ROI and energy calculators, white papers and online resources to help you plan the ideal data center.

There’s a lot to learn from taking a quick tour of the data center. Be like Tom Cruise and solve the problems before they exist.