Vlogs

Remember Michael Dell talking at Oracle OpenWorld about Dell’s plan to reduce IT infrastructure spend by $200 billion? That doesn’t happen by making pretty PowerPoint. The team here in Round Rock has a rock-solid plan to bring Virtual-Ready Infrastructure (VRI) to life and soon.

So, what’s in it for customers … the folks actually struggling with hundreds of unique tools, scores of unique skill sets and dozens of unique processes. The ultimate goal of Dell’s VRI is to reduce customers IT spend through the use of fewer tools, fewer tasks and optimized IT delivery.

Paul Prince, Dell’s CTO, Enterprise Product Group, explains our VRI investment in the clip below.

The unified resource manager Paul mentions is a solution from Scalent Systems, a partnership we announced during VMworld this year.

It will allow you to dynamically manage your servers, storage and networking and allows one of the biggest resource savings:

• Rack once, cable once – modify workloads without touching the physical infrastructure
• Works with existing hardware
• Incorporates both physical and virtual workloads
• Doesn’t effect in-band server performance

We’re excited about what’s evolving, so please stay tuned. We’ll definitely be back to share more information on how this and the rest of VRI will come to life for you.

Stephen Murdoch, Dell’s VP and GM of Large Enterprise in EMEA, opened Gitex this week with an address on the Efficient Enterprise, highlighting how IT can give organizations a competitive advantage.  Key technologies such as virtualization, storage optimization and ITaaS can help CIOs cut overall data center costs.

Check out clips from his address as well as comments from a few of Dell’s Middle East customers about the projects they are working on to improve the overall efficiency of their organizations.

Jimmy Pike is the director of systems architecture for the Data Center Solutions group here at Dell and self-proclaimed “head geek.”   Using a tool case with its insides stripped out, part of an old inbox and a bunch of off the shelf components he has created the world’s first portable “data center.”   (All for the princely sum of ~$2,000)

This former toolkit now holds:

• Two dual-socket servers featuring 2.5GHz Intel processors
• One server running Windows ‘03 acting as the DHCP and domain server and the other running Red Hat linux.
• 2 x 1TB SATA drives for each of the servers
• 32GB of memory
• A single central power supply
• A 5-port Gigabit Ethernet switch
• 2 x 500GB scratch discs

and a whole bunch more…

Extra credit reading:

GigaOm – Exclusive: Dell Shows Off a Data Center — In a Briefcase!

Pau for now…

Much like the game my kids have always loved, Where's Waldo, on a daily basis we get the pleasure of trying to keep track of our newest colleague, Barton George, Dell's cloud evangelist.

He spent some time at OpenSource World/CloudWorld/Next Generation Data Center, which previously went by a much simpler name of LinuxWorld, and appears to have interviewed the entire left side of the menu (read: reference to Steve Guttenberg in the 1982 film Diner). He's posted those interviews on his blog and many of them here on Inside Enterprise IT (including Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth, Egenera's Ken Oestrich, Right Scale's Michael Crandell, GoGrid's John Keagy and Reductive Labs' Luke Kanies, among many others).

Well, the tables were turned on Barton recently and Michael Cote of RedMonk spent some time talking to Barton for their IT Management & Cloud Podcast.

They discussed a broad range of topics, including:

• Swinging of dead cats;
• Dell's cloud strategy and Dell's Data Center Solutions group;
• Dell's desire to expand these efforts to a wider group of customers;
• Software-as-a-Service; and,
• Recent industry events and cloud conferences.

Take some time to listen to the podcast here.

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and the head of Canonical, the commercial entity behind the popular linux distribution, is currently making his rounds in the States.  Yesterday he was quite busy,  taking the stage at both the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco as well as at  LinuxCon up in Portland Oregon.

Today he popped by Dell here in Austin to chat.  I grabbed him for a few minutes right before lunch. Here is the result:

Some of the topics Mark tackles:

• The release yesterday of Dell’s Mini netbook with Ubuntu Moblin Remix – Developer Edition. (More details on the release from the Dell blog.)
• Mark’s keynote yesterday at Linuxcon and the themes of cadence, quality and design.
• His kerfluffle with the Debian community around release schedules.
• The cloud-related goals for next month’s Ubuntu 9.10 release, Karmic Koala:
  • To be able to deploy your own cloud across 5-10 servers in 15 mins to an hour
  • Be able to enable private clouds that are completely EC2 compatible
  • Ability to create a library of virtual appliances that will deploy on EC2 or private clouds
• The announcement earlier this week of the 10.04 Long Term Support (LTS) release named “Lucid Lynx.”
• Mark’s thoughts on Windows 7 or as he calls it, “the wonderful Service Pack for Vista.”
• How long until profitability.

Pau for now…