Last week, we welcomed more than 40 people in our first EMEA Cloud Chat from various geographies, amongst them Dell engineers from our US offices as well as sales and marketing people, trainers and customers from Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Sweden. Thank you all for taking time and engaging with us!

As announced earlier, we will follow up with further cloud chats, diving deeply into specific solution areas. We will host upcoming cloud chats every third Thursday of a month, 3.00 pm CET. Our next chat is scheduled for April 19th and we will talk about Dell’s OpenStack distribution and Dell Crowbar,the leading open source installation tool for OpenStack and Hadoop. A pre-chat blog post is already in the work, providing a detailed outlook. Stay tuned!

In case you couldn’t attend (or if you’d like to learn more about the solution areas discussed in the chat) please find below a summarized transcript. We cleaned it up and reordered some fragments, making the transcript more digestible (the entire transcript is almost 20 pages long):

Dell Openstack & Crowbar

Stephen Spector: As a starting point, we want to highlight the announcement yesterday (March 21st 2012) on the Openstack (Crowbar) coming to Europe and Asia. The Dell team has a complete Openstack "distro" available globally and the Crowbar project allows you to leverage the concept of Devops to install a complete install of Openstack on bare metal. Dell’s Barton Geore has a nice blog post but we have Rob Hirschfeld here with us. Rob Hirschfeld is the main architect behind Crowbar and the technical lead on the Dell Openstack distro. Rob, can you provide a bigger overview of Crowbar to help people understand how that helps Openstack?

Rob Hirschfeld: Sure. Crowbar is an open source project that we started to make sure that it was fast and repeatable to install Openstack (and other cloud software). It was very important to us that we could get to production. What we did was start from the Openstack Chef scripts. So Crowbar uses Chef as a foundation, but we needed to have hardware deploy & orchestration. We've been getting some great interaction from EMEA community members on the Crowbar list. So, we've been seeing activity about both Diablo and Essex (recently added).

Stephen Spector: Is Dell releasing Essex soon or are we staying with Diablo?

Rob Hirschfeld: Our Diablo distro include Dashboard & Keystone. The current release is Dialbo because that's what's released. But we felt like it was critical to include Keystone & Dashboard in that.

Stephen Spector: When is Essex set to release?

Rob Hirschfeld: We don't have an official date yet - we're evaluating it and need to see the final bits.

Stephen Spector: Can you provide some links on where people can get more info on Crowbar and Openstack from Dell?

Rob Hirschfeld: http://dell.com/openstack and http://dell.com/crowbar. Crowbar is open source, so the best way to start learning it in detail is from the github wiki: http://github.com/dellcloudedge/crowbar/wiki.

Dell Boomi

Stephen Spector: Please welcome Ralph Hibbs, Marketing Director from the Dell Boomi Application Integration solution team. Dell Boomi is an innovative cloud solution allowing Enterprise customers to leverage the latest in SaaS solutions while continuing to leverage their existing enterprise software investments. Ralph, can you tell us more about Dell Boomi?

Ralph Hibbs: Dell Boomi is an application integration platform that resides in the cloud. It can connect any combination of applications, regardless of where they reside: public cloud, private cloud or on-premise.

Stephen Spector: Can you provide an example of app integration?

Ralph Hibbs: Earlier this week, we announced that we are working with several EMEA customers in helping the Oneworld Airline Alliance deploy an IT hub in the cloud to exchange frequent flyer information. This has us working with such EMEA companies as Air Berlin and British Airways. The IT hub between airlines is one example of application integration. Another example, inside a corporation would be connecting Salesforce.com to a financial application, such as SAP or Oracle to exchange information about closed orders and invoicing.

Stephen Spector: I know there was a blog post on that, do you have the link for everyone?

Ralph Hibbs: Here's a link to the Oneworld press release.

DVS Simplified Appliance

Stephen Spector: Please welcome Brent Doncaster, Product Marketing for virtualization solutions. Can you provide an intro to the newly released Dell solution for Virtualized Desktops?

Brent Doncaster: Dell recently announced a new addition to our DVS portfolio of desktop virtualization solutions - DVS Simplified, an integrated VDI appliance is now available in the USA, and it will available in EMEA in 2 weeks. DVS Simplified Appliance is in addition to our enterprise solution and our Dell Cloud based "as-a-service" offer for virtualizing desktop environments.

Stephen Spector: Is the DVS Simplified Appliance based on Citrix or another technology?

Brent Doncaster: DVS Simplified Appliance integrates and factory installs Citrix VDI-in-a-box software with a factory pre-configured Dell sever. It’s an "appliance" is the easy to think of it - we have done all the mechanical software installation and pre-configuration. The cool thing about DVS Simplified Appliance - from out of the box to being up and running can take as little as an afternoon.

Dell Public VMware vCloud

Stephen Spector: Please welcome Adam Dawson, Program Manager on Dell Security Solutions, to discuss the new security features added to Dell vCloud. Can you briefly talk about the Dell - Trend Micro relationship for our public VMware vCloud?

Adam Dawson: This is a really cool solution. Security is every CIO's primary concern in moving to the cloud. So we built a relationship with Trend Micro to offer cloud-based encryption key management for your Dell vCloud infrastructure data. You can encrypt the data in Dell's cloud, and you will be the only one with access to it. Dell won't have access to the keys or the data, but you only pay for the keys you use and the billing will be integrated into your monthly vCloud bill.

Stephen Spector: Where are the keys stored?

Adam Dawson: The encryption keys are stored in Trend Micro's data center in Germany. The VM with encrypted data requests the key at startup and if the VM passes integrity checks, the key is dispatched to the VM which allows access to the encrypted data.

Ralph Hibbs: How is the Dell & Trend Micro solution delivered? A cloud service, appliance?

Adam Dawson: The Trend Micro service is delivered as a SaaS solution in the cloud. You can order from Dell, and Dell will provision your account through Trend Micro's software portal online.

Stephen Spector: What gets encrypted on the VM? Just data or the VM itself?

Adam Dawson: You encrypt individual data volumes (drive letters in Windows, mount points in Linux). So you can pick and choose to encrypt only sensitive data.

Stephen Spector: Quick note on Dell's Public Cloud - vCloud Datacenter Service currently available in the US. We are working very hard to bring to the European market (stay tuned for more info on this).

Florian Klaffenbach: The work on the German cloud data center will start next week.

Stephen Spector: Please welcome Matt Domsch, Solutions Architect in the Office of the CTO, to discuss Dell’s new Disaster Recovery and Backup Solutions.  I want to ask you Matt about Disaster Recovery and how public clouds are changing the way customers view this important deliverable.

Matt Domsch: A lot of companies I get to speak with daily have DR plans. They've been building second DR data centers and watching their costs skyrocket. Cloud gives companies a second, often less expensive and less hassle method to do DR.

Stephen Spector: Are companies using public clouds for the backup?

Matt Domsch: The concept is fairly simple - you create standby application instances in a cloud, and you regularly back up your critical data to the Dr site storage. Having both storage and ability to run VMs in a remote public cloud, gives you the ability to "flip over" fairly quickly. Public cloud for backup is popular, at a consumer level, and increasingly, at a business level.

The great thing about backups is they are usually "write once, read never", which make them the perfect thing to place in a cloud, where performance variations day-to-day don't really impact your running business. For customers, Dell is working actively on new backup and disaster recovery solutions for the public cloud so stay tuned for more details on those solutions.

Stephen Spector: Customers - as you can see Dell has a great deal of Cloud solutions for application integration (Dell  Boomi), public and private clouds both open source and VMware based, security (dell Secureworks & partnership with Trend Micro), VDI solutions that are the simplest installs in the marketplace, as well as special cloud hardware to meet customer demands. Feel free to visit dell.com/cloud for more info.

Stephen Spector: I have a good blog post on the various Dell Cloud solutions that I wrote last week. This blog post has all the Dell Cloud solutions and what they can do. The trick is to meet the customer's needs!

Thank you to everyone for attending the 1st Emea Cloud Chat today and I am pleased that we were able to have a variety of Dell cloud experts provide some basic info on the various cloud solutions that we offer. At future chats, we will go in more detail on those solutions to offer you more insight into the products and how they can drive your business forward.

Chat Hosts

Stephen Spector, Cloud Evangelist at Dell (Twitter: @SpectorAtDell)
Florian Klaffenbach, Community Technologist at Dell (Twitter: @FloKlaffenbach)
Rafael Knuth, Social Media Manager at Dell (Twitter: @RafaelKnuth)