Inside Enterprise IT

This morning at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto the company announced their Open Compute projec t Partners and kindred spirits were there to tell the story behind Open Compute and explain what they think it means to the industry. One group of kindred spirits were the individuals from Rackspace...

Cloud Computing has been a concept that dates back as early as the 1960’s. It has had many precursors such as utility computing, the ASP model, autonomic computing and the list goes on. Below is an interesting take by some colleagues on the cloud computing history that includes some fun facts...

Former Dell DCS dude Frank Frankovsky has been at Facebook for about 18 months. Frank is Facebook’s Director, Hardware Design and Supply Chain and since he arrived, he has been heavily involved in the Open Compute projec t. Today was the big day when Open Compute made its worldwide debut. Frank...

This morning, at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, the company unveiled the Open Compute project . Also on hand to support the announcement were partners such as Dell and Intel, who served on a panel alongside representatives from Rackspace, the Department of Energy, Zynga and Facebook. Forrest...

Today Dell is announcing that it is continuing to put its money where its mouth is when it comes to its transformation into a solutions provider, this time to the tune of $1 Billion. The goal of this investment, which is being made this year, is to provide customers with a complete set of resources and...

OpenStack , the open source cloud platform based on code donated by NASA and Rackspace, has gained considerable traction since it was launched eight months ago. The community has rapidly grown and there have been several releases. Now its time to get potential customers trying it out and kicking the...

Dell’s Data Center Solutions group (DCS) is no longer a toddler. Over the weekend we turned four! Four years ago on March 27, 2007 Dell announced the formation of the Data Center Solutions group, a special crack team designed to service the needs of hyperscale customers. On that day eWeek announced...

World Hosting Days is going on right now outside of Frankfurt and our group is using this event to debut our new PowerEdge C microservers. These new microservers, which come in both Intel and AMD flavors, are right-sized for dedicated hosting applications and provide extreme density and efficiency. ...

This week, outside of Frankfurt, WorldHostingDays is taking place. A whole delegation of folks from the Data Center Solutions group is there to support the announcement of our new microserver line. A lot of our key partners are there as well. One such partner is AMD . Earlier today, AMD director...

Earlier this morning at WorldHostingDays outside of Frankfurt, we announced our new line of PowerEdge C microservers . While this is our third generation of microservers, its the first that are available beyond the custom designed systems we’ve been building for a small group of hyperscale web...

Online.net , owned by the Iliad group, is the second largest hoster in the French market. The company had traditionally been focused on the higher end of the dedicated hosting market with services starting at 29.99 euro/month and predominantly based on Dell’s rack mounted servers. About three years...

Microservers are a class of scaled-out systems that Dell’s Data Center Solutions group has been designing for customers for the last several years. These ultra-dense systems are made up of up to twelve discrete servers within one enclosure and are perfect for dedicated web hosting and telco customers...

One of the trickiest things to get right in an open source project is the governance model. Who makes up the various boards and gets what authority is something struggled over and something that virtually no one gets right straight out of the gate. Its particularly interesting if you are a commercial...

Last week and this, Austin’s downtown has been taken over by the South by Southwes t festival (SXSW). What started out nearly 25 years ago as a music festival/conference has grown to include parallel film and interactive events as well. During the event every bar and venue downtown is occupied...

One small step for OpenStack , one giant step for mankind! Ok, that may be taking it a bit far but today there is some exciting news that Dell and Rackspace have announced. If OpenStack is new to you it’s the open source cloud platform based off of the Nebula cloud code base donated by NASA...

Earlier this month when the Bexar release for OpenStack went live, a meet up was held in Santa Clara. As a part of the event, a series of lightening talks were given by various OpenStack community members. One of the speakers was Dell’s very own Rob Hirschfeld , a senior cloud solutions architect...

In case you’re not familiar with it, Dell’s Data Center Solutions (DCS) group has been around for nearly four years, acting as a “custom tailor” to some of the largest internet superstars and scale-out leaders, organizations like Facebook, Microsoft Azure and Lawrence Livermore...

Last November, Dell announced the Dell Cloud Solution for Web Applications . This turnkey offering is composed of Dell systems and Joyent Software along with a reference architecture all supported by Dell services. This solution enables a private Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment to support the...

A while ago, as a follow-up to our white paper “Laying the Groundwork for Private and Public Clouds” Dell and Intel worked with CIO magazine to put together a Tech Dossier that picked up where our previous paper left off. “ A Revolutionary Approach to Cloud Building ” consists...

Dell’s Data Center Solutions (DCS) group has some pretty colorful folks. One of the more interesting members is Jimmy Pike, the man IDG New’s James Niccolai refered to as the “Willy Wonka of servers.” Jimmy, the self-proclaimed “chief geek” of the DCS team is the consummate...

Yesterday, the announcement went out that the Dell | Canonical Enterprise Cloud , Standard Edition was out and ready for consumption. What this cloud-in-a-box allows folks to do is to set-up affordable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas)-style private clouds in their computer labs or data centers. The...

Every year at the end of January Dell holds a giant kick-off meeting for our enterprise and public sales forces. The event, which has been held in Las Vegas the last two years, is a four-day happening consisting of keynotes, sessions and a full-scale expo where the sales team can touch and learn first...

A group of “stackers” (Rackspace employees involved in OpenStack ) paid us a visit today here at Dell. During a break in the meetings I got some time with Mark Collier , VP of Marketing and Business development at Rackspace who has been focused on building up OpenStack. I chatted with Mark...

In a recent article by Chris Mellor on The Register’s site , it is noted that certain segments of the hard drive market are hurting and blame was given to the rise of tablets, flash drives, and a growing dependence on the cloud for storage. I totally agree with the premise that spinning media in...

Earlier this month an interview I did with Robert Duffner, Director of Product management for Windows Azure , went live on the Windows Azure team blog . Robert asked me a variety of questions about Cloud security, how I see the Cloud evolving, the pitfalls of the cloud, where Dell plays etc. I was...