Search results for 'app:weblogs' matching tag 'Vlogs'

Stoneware: Developing & Selling Private Cloud Software

DELL-Barton G — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 06:00:00 GMT

At the cloud expo in Santa Clara earlier this month I ran into Rick German, CEO of Stoneware, Inc. I had previously heard of Stoneware since they are partnering with Dell on a cloud offering for education but I knew that was just one area in which they played. I sat down with Rick and learned about all they did.

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Some of the topics Rick tackles:

Helping customers to build their own private clouds within their data centers and enabling them to plug in their own windows and webhosted apps (plugging public cloud apps into the data center). Taking orgs from client-centric to web-centric.
Delivery via a virtual web desktop accessed from a plethora of browsers: Firefox, IE, Chrome, Opera and Safari.
Stoneware’s 10-year history and how the advent of “cloud-o-mania” has helped or hurt them.
What to look for from Stoneware in the year ahead.

Pau for now…

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

DELL-Barton G — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 06:00:00 GMT

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…

Dell Outlines HPC Strategy and Cray Partnership

DELL-Donnie B — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 06:00:00 GMT

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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Talking about Gluster: Clustered Cloud Storage

DELL-Barton G — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 06:00:00 GMT

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 Extends its Networking Portfolio With Juniper Networks

Dell-Jennifer G — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 05:00:00 GMT

In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot of planning going on around Dell lately. We’ve come to you before and talked about our upcoming Virtual-Ready Infrastructure (VRI) and how the Scalent relationship fits into that. However, we haven’t yet given you a ton of details on the networking piece. Yeah, ok – we told you how we’re expanding our Brocade partnership, but there’s even more.

We’re now adding Juniper to round out the end-to-end 10GbE story. Both the new Brocade and Juniper networking products will become part of our existing PowerConnect brand and will extend that brand into areas like WAN, security and data-center Ethernet switching.

The Dell team has worked hard to bring choice to our customers. This announcement is more proof of that.

Dig into the video below where Larry Hart talks more details on the Juniper partnership, how it will play with our other products, and what it means for our relationship with Cisco.

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Day Three of Dell at Gitex 2009: IT in Education

DELL-Bruce Eric — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Dell hosted its first roundtable with higher education customers in the Middle East today at Gitex Technology Week in Dubai.

Josh Claman, vice president and general manager of Dell’s EMEA Public business, and Mathew Boice, general manager of SunGuard, took time out to discuss the key education trends and themes they heard from customers. John Coulston, Middle East marketing manager, moderates their discussion.

Have a look.

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Day Two of Dell at Gitex 2009: The Efficient Enterprise

DELL-Bruce Eric — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 05:00:00 GMT

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.

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The Scoop on Virtual-Ready Infrastructure (VRI)

Dell-Jennifer G — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 05:00:00 GMT

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.

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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.

A Data Center That Fits in the Overhead Bin

DELL-Barton G — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 05:00:00 GMT

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)

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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…

Where's Waldo? No, Where's Barton George!

DELL-Bruce Eric — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 05:00:00 GMT

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.