Dell Commences Cloud Computing Charge,

By Andrew R Hickey, ChannelWeb

Dell sharpened its enterprise cloud computing strategy, launching a host of new products and services—including new cloud-specific servers—to deliver turnkey cloud solutions and start "taking the guesswork out" of cloud computing.

At its massive Solutions for the Virtual Era product launch in San Francisco, Dell revealed a host of new products and services. As part of the launch, Dell pulled the curtain off of its new turnkey cloud solutions play. The offerings piggyback on the roughly three years of experience Dell has amassed with cloud offerings in its Data Center Solutions group.

The Round Rock, US-based company said it is offering new integrated solution stacks, services and hardware to ease the deployment and management of cloud environments.

In a blog post outlining Dell's new cloud solutions, Dell cloud evangelist Barton George said the company's new solutions feature tested and supported cloud solution stacks tying together hardware, software and services that ease customers' ability to deploy and manage cloud environments.

First to market will be Dell's cloud platform for Web applications. Working with cloud software provider Joyent, Dell will offer a turnkey private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution comprising pre-tested, pre-assembled and fully-supported hardware, software and services—all sold and supported by Dell. The PaaS offering will thwart key challenges of Web app development and deployment like unpredictable traffic and fear of under-provisioning and migration. Dell said the solution is aimed at enterprise application developers looking to develop applications in the cloud to be deployed in the cloud, George wrote.

Dell also added new ISV partners to the mix to help lead customers through deployments. George said the cloud Partner Program will be available to cloud ISVs, through which Dell will offer cloud solutions and blueprints optimized and validated for Dell's cloud platforms. At first, Dell will work with three partners: Aster Data, which will provide Web analytics; Canonical, which offers an open source Infrastructure-as-a-Service private cloud; and Greenplum, a self-service data warehousing vendor.

Dell said it will continue to work with VMware and Microsoft on the Evolutionary cloud side, and Microsoft and Dell will work together on joint solutions on the Windows Azure platform with Dell offering services and Microsoft investing in Dell hardware for the Azure infrastructure, Dell said.

Dell also launched a new line of hyperscale-inspired PowerEdge C servers, which includes the PowerEdge C1100, C2100 and C6100 targeting HPC, data analytics, gaming, social networking and, of course, cloud computing. The servers are based on Dell-created designs that are in use by large Web companies and cloud providers. The C1100 is a high-memory, power-efficient, cluster-optimized compute node server; the C2100 is a high performance data analytics, cloud computing platform and cloud storage server; and the C6100 is a four-node cloud- and cluster-optimized, shared infrastructure server.

Lastly, Dell unveiled a suite of professional cloud servers geared toward helping customers prepare for and implement cloud computing solutions. Dell's Integrated Solution Services will deliver cloud lifecycle management and also include cloud readiness assessment services, and additional services around cloud design, deployment, management and maintenance.

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Cloud Computing Must Have Proper Governance

Cloud computing has taken off as a trend in enterprise IT, but analysts say proper governance is necessary for companies to realize the full benefits of on-demand systems.

New, relatively unmanaged and untamed technologies always draw the same analogy: the wild, Wild West. That's what was said about the Internet 15 years ago and several subsets of computing technology, which tend to be unregulated when they first emerge. So is the same situation with the Cloud.

As firms move from hosted, dedicated servers to the looser virtualized environment of Cloud computing, that old wild, wild west feeling is starting to come back, and if people are going to feel comfortable using cloud services, they must be rules and governance set down for proper administration. So says IT research firm Ovum in a report by Enterprise IT Planet.

Cloud computing has already established itself as the next disruptive technology in the enterprise, but IT governance in the next few years will be vital as companies feel their way through the transition away from on-site software applications to cloud-based options, independent research firm Ovum said in its latest report.

The benefits of the Cloud -- lower costs, a smaller data-center footprint and immediate access to multiple applications for a distributed, international workforce with minimal fuss -- are also some things that can expose companies to degrees of risk that simply weren't possible during the heyday of locally deployed software installations.

Cloud computing is here. Running applications on machines in an Internet-accessible data center can bring plenty of advantages. Yet wherever they run, applications are built on some kind of platform. For on-premises applications, this platform usually includes an operating system, some way to store data, and perhaps more. Applications running in the cloud need a similar foundation. The goal of Microsoft’s Windows Azure is to provide this. Part of the larger Azure Services Platform, Windows Azure is a platform for running Windows applications and storing data in the cloud.

Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. To deploy a new solution, most of your time and energy is spent on defining the right infrastructure, hardware and software, to put together to create that solution, Cloud computing allows people to share resources to solve new problems. Cloud computing users can avoid capital expenditure (CapEx) on hardware, software, and services when they pay a provider only for what they use.

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