Vlogs

Earlier this month at Cloud World/Open World I bumped into Jonathan Bryce one of the two founders of the cloud platform formerly known as “Mosso”  (now known as Rackspace Cloud).

Last year when I interviewed Jonathan, I did an audio podcast.  This time around I was armed with my Flip Mino and caught it all on video for the little(r) screen.

Some of the topics Jonathan addresses:

• When Rackspace funded employees Jonathan and Todd to go off and start their cloud venture 4 years ago, why didn’t they brand it “Rackspace?”
• Why did they recently decide to roll Mosso back into the mothership and rebrand it?
• The progression of in-house -> colocation -> managed hosting -> cloud.
• The three pieces of Rackspace Cloud: Cloud Servers & Cloud Files (infrastructure as a service) and Cloud Sites (platform as a service with the option of using either the LAMP or .NET stack).
• Which offering is getting the most traction.
• Why their customer Fresh Books went with Cloud Files.

Pau for now…

There are lots of conversations going on in the media about the customer concerns related to upgrading to a Microsoft Windows 7/Server 2008 R2. 

And rightly so, as it is at the top of many customers minds.  However, there are many other ways customers are looking at to better holistically optimize their Microsoft applications and environments.  Recently, Burk Buechler reflected on the conversations that he is having with customers related to their Microsoft environments and how Dell is helping those customers to better holistically optimize them.

Listen as Burk describes how Dell ProConsult provides best practice and in-depth expertise to ensure optimal integration of Microsoft’s core technologies to address customer needs.

One of the customers that participated in yesterdays' press briefing with Dell and VMware was Frederick Memorial Healthcare (FMH), which began providing health services to Maryland residents over 100 years ago.

As the hospital is entering its second century in an expanded facility, Roy Turner, FMH's server systems engineer, explains how the healthcare provider's use of technology is key to delivering top-quality care to its patients. For example, FMH is one of the few hospitals in its area with a wireless infrastructure throughout the facility to make information and communication instantly available to care providers.

Dell has helped FMH with IT projects in the past, and the customer trusted the Dell's advice when we recommended VMware as the leading virtualization technology.

Dell ProConsult Services performed the hospital’s initial data center virtualization implementation using VMware ESX 3.5 and VMware Virtual Center 2.5. Dell helped the IT team deploy 106 virtual servers on six new Dell PowerEdge R900 servers.

FMH asked Dell to help it upgrade to VMware vSphere 4 and the VMware vCenter Server. The Dell Services team worked hard to ensure FMH’s VMware vSphere 4 project was a success, and helped set up an initial environment and test the upgrade path FMH would use for its production environment. Roy and the server engineering team have virtualized over 100 servers, with 75 being converted from physical to virtual, reducing power consumption and cooling in the data center.

Roy spent a little bit of time with us explaining their challenges and how they worked with Dell and VMware.

Dell and VMware this week briefed reporters on our respective company's virtualization strategies and some of the trends that customers are facing. Media coverage of the event is already appearing, including this piece from Jean Baptiste Su on his TechPulse 360 blog. 

Joining Dell's Paul Prince, Chief Technology Officer for Dell's large enterprise business, and Steve Herrod, VMware's CTO and senior vice president of the company's research and development, were a number of customers that are actively using virtualization technologies in their infrastructures. Dell/VMware customers Cadence, Northwest National Gas, Trilliant and Frederick Memorial Healthcare have all implemented virtualization and are seeing the benefits. We have interviews with several of those customers that we plan to bring to you soon.

Following yesterday's press briefing, we sat down with Paul and Steve after the event to get their thoughts on the interaction and what was discussed. Many of you may have followed us as we live-tweeted the event. If not, check out @bruceericatdell, @mattmcginnis, @dellservergeek, @kongy_dell for those tweets from yesterday afternoon.

Dell has a long history with VMware. In fact, our virtualization strategy is based on this long history – we’ve been a top partner and reseller for more than seven years. We’ve worked closely together to develop platforms that are built for virtualization and optimized for cloud computing applications. For instance, we were involved in the development of the vStorage API from the beginning; it’s a part of our shared vision. Last Spring, we unveiled vStorage-ready Dell EqualLogic virtualized SANs, meaning that we’ve enabled VMware virtual machines to take full advantage of the advanced intelligence of our storage arrays. 

Take a look.

As you may recall, I published a post a few weeks ago about Dell's involvement in the launch of Wolfram Alpha, a computational search engine that is built on servers from Dell's Data Center Solutions team.

In this video, R Systems' CEO Brian Kucic outlines the infrastructure behind Wolfram Alpha and how it was built out in less than two weeks.

Brian says the cluster, called R Smarr, is the fastest privately owned cluster in the U.S., the fifth fastest Dell cluster in the U.S. and the 44th fastest supercomputer in the world (according to the June 2008 Top 500 list).

Wolfram also did a post on their deployment over on their blog today. The post is titled "Building Rome in a Day," appropriate for the significant amount of work that was done to bring their supercomputer online in such a short period of time.