Inside Enterprise IT

A Quick Overview of Azure: What it is/Where its going

2009-11-19T19:43:00Z

I’m currently in New York visiting customers and attending Interop/Web 2.0. While these two conferences have different session tracks their expos are co-located and attendees of either can visit the whole lot. It was then in the Web 2.0 section earlier today where I met Keith Pijanowski, a Microsoft evangelist for Windows Azure.

Keith has been working with Azure the last year and half and telling customers how it can drive down costs and make their software development cycle more agile. I got Keith to take a quick break from booth duty and explain it to me. (I wanted to know what all those Dell servers were powering).

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Some of the topics Keith tackles

How it works: You develop on premise (the cloud environment is emulated on the developer’s desktop) and then upload your code to the cloud where you have all the services, resources and compute power needed to run your app. You then manage all your code and storage areas via a portal.
Yesterday’s official commercial launch– tech preview no more.
Azure is ready to use but Microsoft wont charge for another 2 mos. The last free month the customer will get a bill of what it would cost if they had had to pay.
What’s coming to Azure in the future, some examples:
- Right now you have SQL Azure database in the cloud but they will build out the SQL Azure brand so that it has many of the same capabilities that customers are used to on premise.
- When .net 4.0 becomes available they will have a work flow service
- Will have synchronization services (SQL Azure sync) so customers can have a database in the cloud and one on premise and sync them.

Pau for now…

Talking about Gluster: Clustered Cloud Storage

2009-11-18T03:39:00Z

With today’s post, I’m right at the mid-point of my series of video interviews from Cloud Computing Expo. Today’s post offers a two-for-one special, Gluster CEO Hitesh Chellani along with Jack O’Brien who heads Gluster’s product management.

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Some of the topics Hitesh and Jack tackle:

Gluster as a general-purpose open source cluster platform that runs on top of commodity hardware like Dell.
Their goal to transform the storage market the way Red Hat transformed the server market (Gluster employs a subscription model just like Red Hat).
What would you do after spending time at Lawrence Livermore National Labs putting together the second fastest super computer in the world? Hitesh thought he’d distill the experience and apply it to the storage space.
Some of the performance-driven verticals Gluster started out in.
The new hot area of virtual storage next to virtual servers.

Pau for now…

Dell Outlines HPC Strategy and Cray Partnership

2009-11-17T10:12:00Z

Pushing the envelope and finding new innovative ways to deliver an HPC (High-Performance Computing) solution is a priority at Dell. Our recent partnership announcement with Cray and Microsoft illustrate how industry leaders are going about making HPC make more accessible, scalable and affordable.

The Cray CX1-iWS, available exclusively through Dell, combines Cray’s HPC experience with Dell’s market reach resulting in a desk side “supercomputer” that is easy to configure, deploy, administer and use. Leveraging industry standard components such as Intel Xeon processors, Windows 2008 HPC software stack, the Cray CX1-iWS provides a good starting point for engineers, scientists and researchers including R&D groups who need a scalable HPC cluster. The key points on how the Cray CX1-iWS extends and complements traditional workstations by providing an affordably-priced departmental or workgroup HPC hub are covered in my video.

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Adam of Oracle talks about Oracle VM and the Cloud

2009-11-16T21:19:00Z

A couple of weeks ago on the show floor of Cloud Computing Expo in Santa Clara I ran into Adam Hawley, Director of product management for Oracle VM. When Adam finished his stint in the Oracle booth he sat down with me to talk about what was going on at Oracle in the world of virtualization and the cloud.

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Some of the topics Adam tackles:

Oracle VM, Oracle’s sever virtualization and management platform, while based on Xen is all Oracle on top of it.
The Virtual Iron acquisition which is in the process of being incorporated within the Oracle portfolio and is slated for release in 2010.
The Cloud as a higher level of automation on top of virtualization, compared to what traditional virtualization has provided.
Where Oracle will play in the cloud space (hint: think private).
The Oracle assembly builder that Adam was showing off at the show.
Given Larry’s views on cloud computing, is “cloud” a dirty word at Oracle?

Pau for now…

The Planet, from Hoster to Hoster & Cloud Provider

2009-11-16T13:13:00Z

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.

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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…

Learning about Heroku – The Ruby PaaS Solution

2009-11-13T21:00:00Z

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:

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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…

Back from the Bay Area with a fist full of cloudy videos

2009-11-13T16:01:03Z

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…

Betfair Places its Odds on Dell With Windows 7

2009-11-05T15:02:00Z

Last week we experienced one of the most significant and exciting launches from Microsoft… the release of Windows 7! As part of the Microsoft Technology Adoption Program (TAP), Dell consultants worked with a number of customers during their testing and implementation of both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

At Betfair – home of the world’s biggest betting community – robust IT is crucial. Staff at the firm process six million transactions every day; that’s more than the combined total of the European stock markets. Security and high availability are paramount, as are energy efficiency and ease of maintenance.

When the IT team replicated a standard workflow across various operating systems, they saw a 20 percent performance increase with Windows 7. This improved performance will boost staff productivity, as well as increase the time the IT team has for value-added work. New features of Windows 7, including BitLocker and AppLocker will improve security. With staff queuing for upgrades, the end-user benefits are clear. Eighty percent of Betfair’s staff in Europe will be using Windows 7 within the next month.

Ian Burgess, Head of Microsoft and Datacentre Platforms, Betfair says: “We have a list of tickets in our support system from people requesting Windows 7. It’s faster, easier to use and has lots of features that produce a more polished, seamless user experience.”

Betfair has also significantly reduced energy consumption. For example, Windows Server 2008 R2 takes advantage of the energy saving features of Dell PowerEdge servers and Intel technology. Hyper-V will also help to achieve efficiency and simplify management. Burgess says: “One of our Hyper-V clusters has four nodes with capacity to spare, whereas before there were seven nodes at full capacity. That equates to a massive energy saving across our datacentres. We’ve achieved this through the combined features of the PowerEdge R610 servers, and Windows Server 2008 R2.”

So whether your main motivation is the safety of your mission critical data, energy efficiency or the time your IT team spends managing your client estate, read on for an idea of how Dell can support you. If you're interested in more information your company's migration to the Windows 7 environment, take a look at IT Expert Voice, where best practices and news related to Windows 7 in the enterprise is discussed.

Virtualization Déjà Vu

2009-11-04T16:15:00Z

I remember riding in the car which a bunch of teenagers a few months ago when the Seether song “Careless Whisper” came on the radio. They loved it - so edgy, such a great sound. Ugh, really? Had they never heard of Wham? George Michael? I’d like to forget the 80s sometimes, too, but please. How could those kids think that song was an original? Don’t even get me started about Limp Bizkit covering “Faith” … blasphemy.

It happens in music, and it happens in IT -- and it appears to have happened this week.

The recent VCE announcement from Cisco, EMC and VMware sounds very familiar, a lot like the Business-Ready Configurations for Virtualization (also known as vPOD) Dell’s been doing all year.

Their “IT flexibility and lowering the cost of computing” message – yeah, doing that since March. If the popular saying “imitation is the best form of flattery” held true, these three companies would have also leveraged Dell’s passion for customer choice. But they didn’t. Instead, they seem to be focused on locking customers into a proprietary stack of technology. Customers don’t like that. That kind of situation could easily turn into a couple of million dollars.

Fortunately, Cadence Design Systems will never have to worry about that. Check out how they used Business-Ready Configurations to save about $2.7 million in physical-hardware cost. Using Dell’s run books Cadence expects to double the speed at which they deploy VMs to roughly 200 per month.

As we continue to integrate existing and new partners into the configs (EMC, Brocade, Juniper, Scalent), customers will find it even easier to deploy a customized, virtual environment start to finish.

Where is Milli Vanilli these days, anyway?

Learning About Cloud Storage From Nirvanix’s Geoff Tudor

2009-10-29T12:00:00Z

On Friday I grabbed lunch with Geoff Tudor, SVP of business development and co-founder of Nirvanix . After they cleared the plates I talked to Geoff about what Nirvanix does and where he saw cloud storage heading.

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Some of the topics Geoff tackles:

Providing cloud storage for the enterprise from five data centers around the world that are pooled and presented as one large global file server.
The Nirvanix “secret sauce”: the file virtualization layer that sits on top of pooled/virtualized commodity storage.
How Nirvanix’s offering is different than Amazon’s S3 (hint: one’s targeted at enterprises and one’s targeted at developers)
Customers such as the NASA/ASU library which is the largest cloud storage use ever and stores images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera.
Security and how Nirvanix addresses customer’s concerns.
What Geoff sees in the future for cloud storage.

Pau for now…