Dell

At the cloud computing expo in Santa Clara I was able to grab some time with Rob Walters, director of product management at Houston-based The Planet.  Rob, who has an atypical Texas twang, talked to me about how The Planet has been dipping its toe in the cloud waters and how it is soon planning on taking the plunge.

Some of the topics Rob tackles:

• The Planet began its foray into cloud computing over a year ago by partnering with Nirvanix and providing a storage cloud for back-up and archive.
• They have spent the last 9 months working on a cloud compute offering which will launch in Q1.
• The Planet will look to offer the cloud capabilities to their dedicated hosting customers.  They will use the concept of virtualization which these customers understand and appreciate to create an understanding of the cloud, a concept that these customers are still a little leery of.

Pau for now…

Kicking off my series of videos from last week’s Cloud Expo in Santa Clara, here is a chat I had with Oren Teich, of Heroku.  Heroku, if you’re not familiar is a 2-yr old Platform as-a-Service company targeting Ruby developers.  Oren recently joined Heroku as their head of product management and had the following to say:

Some of the topics Oren tackles:

• Where the name “Heroku” comes from and why they were going for a Japanese sounding name.
• Why did they choose Ruby and why did they go with a cloud-based plaform?
• How Heroku is similar/different from Google App Engine and Engine Yard.
• The majority of the folks who have created the 39,000+ apps on the site are hobbists.   That being said, the folks who pay their bills are those who are creating social media apps for platforms like Facebook, Twitter and the iPhone.
• How Heroku makes their money: they charge as you scale and they charge for add-ons.
• What they plan to concentrate on in the year ahead

Pau for now…

Last week I made the trek out of the Lone Star state and headed west to the Bay Area.  I spent the first day in San Francisco where I took our sales folks through my cloud presentation and then had meetings with a few members of the press.  Here is the outcome of a couple of those meetings:

• Dell Eyes Cloud Computing — Information Week
• Dell schools net ‘dolphins’ in ways of Microsoft ‘whale’ — The Register

Down on the Peninsula

From the city I headed down to Santa Clara and the Cloud Computing Expo.  I don’t think I saw a single customer at the event but I did run into a bunch of interesting companies in attendance.  With my trusty Flip Mino I even recorded a bunch of interviews that I will be rolling out in the days to come.  Here’s the list

• 3Tera — Barry Lynn, CEO
• Heroku — Oren Teich head of product
• Oracle VM — Adam Hawley, Director of Product management
• Gluster — Hitesh Cellani, CEO and Jack O’Brien head of marketing
• The Planet — Rob Walters, director of product management
• Stoneware — Rick German, CEO
• Cloud Camp — Dave Nielsen, co-founder

Stay tuned.

A Zoho billboard in the San Jose airport, right in the heart of Google country.

Pau for now…

You might think that after two full days of keynotes, breakout sessions, events and meetings at Oracle OpenWorld it would be hard to excite a convention hall full of business and IT leaders, but Michael Dell had just the right formula with:

• A compelling vision - Redirect IT dollars from management and maintenance to innovation and improving the business by building an Efficient Enterprise;
• Big commitments for quantifiable results like working to take $200 billion of inefficiency out of the $1.2 trillion IT infrastructure industry spend and driving $200 million in savings for Dell's own IT;
• Impressive statistics, something almost all of us in the IT industry get into, of the power of the Dell and Oracle partnership and Dell's leadership and track record in providing solutions;
• Cool products, including:
  • Dell's 11th generation of PowerEdge servers were onstage and Michael highlighted the enhancements in these new servers to simplify deployment, enhance performance, reduce complexity and lower power and cooling requirements;
  • He also discussed more innovation to come next year with new PowerEdge servers based on Intel Nehalem EX architecture; and,
  • Talked about continued enhancements to the EqualLogic storage products, like SSD (launched this year) and 10Gbps Ethernet (coming soon) that will drive efficiency and performance for storage.
• A blueprint to make this vision a reality including:
  • Standardization on open standard solutions built on x86-based servers;
  • Simplification by starting with the applications and taking the complexity out of the way they are supported and managed, and by using Virtualization and Storage Consolidation;
  • Automation by streamlining Services delivery and enabling self-service IT models where critical business services can be deployed through the cloud.
• Dell's own plan - Robin Johnson, CIO of Dell, shared how he is driving inefficiency out of the Dell IT machine
• Having fun - Everyone was excited by Larry Ellison's surprise appearance and from the return of the Tech Force alliance!

Hopefully you are as excited as we are about building the Efficient Enterprise, and if you’re here this week, be sure to come see us in the booth. 

You can follow us on Twitter @dellatORACLEwld and check out my earlier post on Direct2Dell with details of all our activities.

Oracle OpenWorld is in full swing and things are exciting here in San Francisco. If you’re here, be sure to stop by the booth and say hi, see a demo, listen in on a presentation, enter to win one of the new Dell Latitude Z portable notebooks and catch one of the many breakout sessions with Dell. Also be sure not to miss Michael Dell’s keynote Tuesday, October 13 at 8:30 AM in Moscone North, Hall D.

One of our focuses at Dell is to help people plan for an Oracle deployment. If you fall into that camp, here are a few items for you to consider:

• Is the solution scalable and based on industry-standard application and technology solutions?
• Can you get the complete stack of products and solutions, applications and hardware to help you address your pain points and focus on meeting your goals?
• Are you simplifying IT at the least possible acquisition cost?
• Can you count on highly trained Oracle Sales Specialists to guide you on what products and solutions would best fit your requirements?
• Are value-add services available to enhance your productivity and promote IT simplicity through the design and implementation of Oracle solutions comprised of standards-based x86 architecture?
• Do you have everything you need for systems integration such as pre-engineered, tested, and validated Intel-based Oracle database solutions on Red Hat/Oracle Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows Server to ensure compatibility and reduce pre-implementation testing with entire tested solution stacks: servers, storage, switches, operating systems, and Oracle Database software?
• Can you get sizing tools to help you size your projects and provide guidelines for the required infrastructure?
• Are finance options available to help you close the gap between your technology needs and cash flow?

If you need assistance, Dell can provide all these things. Dell and Oracle are committed to each other’s technologies and here are some great examples of this commitment.

• http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/casestudies/2006_HowDellDoesIT.pdf
• http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/casestudies/2006_eheim.pdf
• http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/casestudies/2004_dell_oracle.pdf

You can find out more, like Dell’s Solution sizing, validations and reference architectures, here as well: www.dell.com/oracle

We provide total solutions in terms of the entire stack all tested, and validated, Hardware, Storage, Networking, OS Support, Power & Cooling, Oracle Software, Services, Finance and finally Purchase Consolidation. This is The Difference at Dell. This is why our customers choose Dell / Oracle.

We hope you’ll get to know the Dell and Oracle experience this week. Follow us on Twitter @dellatORACLEwld, check out my earlier post on Direct2Dell with details of our activities and check back here and the Dell TechCenter to stay up to date on all that we’re doing with Oracle.