Dell Has No Future Because It Lacks a Public Cloud

[BillPaxtonIsGod]

With Cisco UCS, once the framework is set up, it is pretty easy to manage and expand. It's setting it up that is bad. Of course, the initial setup is all command line on their switches, so it's more about the switch interface than the actual servers. After that, all the NICs are virtual NICs, and don't have a proper physical interface. The PCIe connection hooks into a virtual management interface for the NICs, which have to be then defined in the management software to actually give the server a network connection. Then managing the server blades and the virtual NICs requires a special software, written entirely in Java of all the hellish things, to get a console. It all requires a master to set up. Once set up, sure, it works pretty well, but getting it there is hellish.

With Dell's remote management, iDRAC, it uses a web html interface to do most things. The remote console is in Java, but it is a stand alone app. Plus their NICs are direct, physical, real NICs that don't require any special interface.

Dude, setting up UCS from scratch is not that hard. I've setup numerous ones in our Prod colos. Yes, it is more work to setup initially but once you do it is actually easier to provision and deploy new blades than a typical Dell rack server (yes, we have those too).

*Disclaimer, I work for a company now owned by Dell*

 

[krotch]

And? They still have it. The article doesn't even mention that fact. Even if it did, I doubt they'd go into any detail as to WHY they're getting out of it. It's a pretty bad article.

Cause that's the future of Dell. Not having a public cloud.

 

[VRT]

Cloud is great and all, but it's a few massive security breech scandals away from collapsing. On-premise will always have a place in any real company's DR plan at least. You need to be able to spin up at least part of your business should a major outage strike.

I agree with you completely. I have been in the "internet" business most of my adult life, having built an ISP when we had a fractional T1 along with a USR Total Control modem bank. To me if you put any of your companies or clients internal critical infrastructure on a public cloud you are just asking for trouble in a big way!

 

[kju1]

Anything without cloud is better than anything with it. Doesn't matter what it is.

Using your very narrow definition of cloud sure. But this is not universally true. Setting aside the wise ass cracks about how clouds provide us with rain I would point out that many companies are running private clouds where they are doing large amounts of parallel processing. Google and facebook are great examples. Both are running on private clouds using customized cloud software. Neither would be better without it...at their current scale they most likely would not function without it.

Look up Apache Hadoop and Java Map Reduce for some other cloud technologies...

 

[LightsOut41]

Interesting you say that about Cisco. Our guys rave about their servers

We moved away from IBM to Cisco UCS in 2012. UCS has been nothing short of amazing.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Using your very narrow definition of cloud sure. But this is not universally true. Setting aside the wise ass cracks about how clouds provide us with rain I would point out that many companies are running private clouds where they are doing large amounts of parallel processing. Google and facebook are great examples. Both are running on private clouds using customized cloud software. Neither would be better without it...at their current scale they most likely would not function without it.

Look up Apache Hadoop and Java Map Reduce for some other cloud technologies...

I guess it really does depend on how broadly you define "The Cloud". In your broader version of the definition including internal private networked resources of large corporations, what on Earth is the difference between "the cloud" and "a datacenter"?

I have no problem with private networked resources. My main area of concern with "the cloud" is centered around giving up control of private data to 3rd parties on the public network.

If it just means the same thing, the term cloud seems superfluous, and we should just get rid of the term "cloud" all together, because it is nothing but a meaningless and superfluous euphemism.

 

[kju1]

I guess it really does depend on how broadly you define "The Cloud". In your broader version of the definition including internal private networked resources of large corporations, what on Earth is the difference between "the cloud" and "a datacenter"?

I have no problem with private networked resources. My main area of concern with "the cloud" is centered around giving up control of private data to 3rd parties on the public network.

If it just means the same thing, the term cloud seems superfluous, and we should just get rid of the term "cloud" all together.

Well thats my point. Amazon et al have polluted the term such that most only associate it with offloading your hosting to "public" third parties. The original "cloud" was more about bringing together disparate commodity hardware to enable parallel processing across large datasets. Googles BigTable would be one of the originals and at the time was only for Google use. Now we have a few different models for cloud that range from IaaS, PaaS, to SaaS. All of which are subtly different and focused on different market segments. And quite frankly marketing departments have really fubared it all as far as perceptions go...

The difference between cloud and datacenter is that a datacenter is just where you host hardware. I have a few clouds sitting in a datacenter alongside non cloud systems. Clouds are more akin to the HPC arena. For the clouds I work with we basically build supercomputers out of commodity hardware and process massive datasets. Things you could not do without these specific technologies.

I dislike the generalized version of cloud because, like most things in life, people do not understand the subtle nuances involved.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

I dislike the generalized version of cloud because, like most things in life, people do not understand the subtle nuances involved.

It looks like two disparate definitions of "cloud" have arisen, one consumer and one Enterprise.

The consumer definition is more or less "Where Apple Stores my Pictures" and essentially consists of automated backup to wide area networked attached storage. This use of the term seems a bit silly.

The Enterprise definition appears to be of more distinct value.

The problem appears to be that even seasoned computer and IT hobbyists like myself are, by and large, not aware of the latter definition.

We probably have Apple to "thank" for that. Weren't they the first to market the term to consumers as part of photo backup on the iPhone?

 

[kju1]

It looks like two disparate definitions of "cloud" have arisen, one consumer and one Enterprise.

The consumer definition is more or less "Where Apple Stores my Pictures" and essentially consists of automated backup to wide area networked attached storage. This use of the term seems a bit silly.

The Enterprise definition appears to be of more distinct value.

The problem appears to be that even seasoned computer and IT hobbyists like myself are, by and large, not aware of the latter definition.

We probably have Apple to "thank" for that. Weren't they the first to market the term to consumers as part of photo backup on the iPhone?

Apple or amazon. I forget which. I have been more focused on the enterprise class clouds since ~2009.

 

[dgingeri]

It looks like two disparate definitions of "cloud" have arisen, one consumer and one Enterprise.

The consumer definition is more or less "Where Apple Stores my Pictures" and essentially consists of automated backup to wide area networked attached storage. This use of the term seems a bit silly.

The Enterprise definition appears to be of more distinct value.

The problem appears to be that even seasoned computer and IT hobbyists like myself are, by and large, not aware of the latter definition.

We probably have Apple to "thank" for that. Weren't they the first to market the term to consumers as part of photo backup on the iPhone?

That's more because regular consumers really don't know what "cloud" means in IT vernacular. They've been fed this thing some companies like to call "cloud" which is more of just basic online storage. It's like RAID. What regular consumers see of "RAID" is actually more of software defined storage, while the real IT RAID is much different. Another example of this would be trucks. The trucks used by regular consumers don't even come close to the trucks used by professionals. Professional trucks are a whole order of magnitude more reliable and carry many orders of magnitude more cargo. My final example would be guns. A lot of people like to boast that they have a gun, when they have a handgun or an AR-15, and nothing close to a real, professional gun, either military or hunting, and they couldn't come close to doing either job. (An AR-15 is not a hunting rifle. It has a third the range and a quarter the damage potential. It would take 4 or 5 shots to take down and elk, where a .300 winmag Savage 99 would take one shot, from twice the distance.) A lot of people like to play like they're using what professionals do, but they are really more like kids playing at it.

 

[nessus]

Dell had a public cloud offering a few years back based on VMware vCloud Director. Then VMware came out with a cloud offering of their own based on the same software, and shortly after that Dell shut their public cloud down. Dell bought EMC, and therefore VMware. Why bring out a differently named public cloud to compete with yourself?