Category Archives: cloud

Will Dell launch a packaged private cloud solution?

Dell are without doubt the masters of taking complex IT hardware and software solutions and turning it into a simple matter of ordering a complete solution through a website, with little or no sales team interaction. While Dell do have a direct sales force, their channel partnerships are much more limited, and you’re unlikely to find a major IT services company pushing Dell as their hardware supplier of choice.

For the last year and a bit, Cisco have been making a splash in the high-end server market with their UCS system, a blade computing system with a highly integrated management platform which can plug into your Cisco network and storage switches and EMC disk arrays to build a dynamic computing platform especially suited to rapidly deploying public or private cloud computing platforms. These UCS systems have generally been sold direct by Cisco, through large IT services companies, and through their Acadia cloud computing joint-venture.

While IBM and HP both have somewhat limited alternatives to Cisco UCS and the fully managed virtualisation “vBlock” package sold by Cisco, EMC and VMware, noone has released a fully developed alternative yet.

In the mean-time, Dell have made some big strides in the public cloud market, with the Dell Data Center Solutions team building custom cloud solutions for customers, andmore recently they’ve purchased Scalent, which provides a high-end system management tool which can configure servers, storage and networking from multiple suppliers. Today they’ve announced their plans to buy 3Par, one of the mid-sized fibre channel storage array suppliers.

3Par may not have the size or financial clout of EMC or NetApp, they definitely have the fundamental technology to compete with them both, and with Dell as the financial backers their R&D budgets should be increased to help them compete both with technology and with pricing.

Post-acquisition, Dell will have almost all the in-house technology to launch an off-the-shelf vBlock competitor, so perhaps the real question is will you be able to buy your new private cloud from the Dell.com online configuration tool, or would Dell rather you engage with a sales team before you buy your new IT platform from them?

Public clouds and the right to terminate

If you pay much attention to IT people on Twitter, blogs, and at conferences you’ll hear a lot of arguments about public vs private clouds, essentially around whether or not a “Private Cloud” can really exist, make any sense, and achieve the level of pricing and scalability that a “Public cloud” (like Amazon EC2 or Rackspace Cloud) can achieve. There’s also plenty of people who’d say that a private cloud can achieve better security than a public cloud, though I’m not sure I’d agree fully with that.

What I do think though is that there is one fundamental difference between a public and private cloud, and it’s not a technical but a contractual one – the right of the public cloud supplier to terminate your service.

In the Amazon Web Services Customer Agreement, section 3.3.2 currently states:

3.3.2. Paid Services (other than Amazon FPS and Amazon DevPay). We may suspend your right and license to use any or all Paid Services (and any associated Amazon Properties) other than Amazon FPS and Amazon DevPay, or terminate this Agreement in its entirety (and, accordingly, cease providing all Services to you), for any reason or for no reason, at our discretion at any time by providing you sixty (60) days’ advance notice in accordance with the notice provisions set forth in Section 15 below.

To me, this is a fundamental difference between a public and private cloud, and why private clouds are being built, and will continue to be built for the foreseeable future.

In a public cloud, the supplier will always want to retain the right to terminate your service if you are doing something they don’t like, and right now there’s no easy way to migrate your services to a new supplier.

Perhaps once the cloud migration tools have achieved a level of functionality and stability that a 60 day notice period isn’t an issue, then public clouds will take another step towards becoming the dominant form of IT services provision.

The future of clouds – "Cheap and cheerful" or "Big Iron"?

Ever since the 1980s there’s been a split in computing hardware, on one side the new “cheap and cheerful” world of PC hardware, and on the other side the old school of “Big Iron”, IBM mainframes which run for years or even decades with no downtime.

If you speak to a mainframe engineer, they’ll tell you that 90% of cloud computing isn’t new, they’ve been doing on-demand workloads, billing based on resource usage, multiple customers on one system, and unified system management since the 1960s.

Now that we’re entering the cloud computing era, IBM mainframes are seeing a big rise in popularity, with IBM producing specialised mainframes designed for running 1000s of Linux virtual machines, and Cisco, EMC and VMware are working together on their VBlock systems, which are essentially their interpretation of a modern mainframe – very serious hardware and software mixed together to get a platform that should essentially never fail. This is the modern “Big Iron”, designed to provide service providers and enterprises the security and confidence to move their most critical systems onto a single unified platform powering a private cloud.

In the public clouds though, cheap and cheerful has already taken the lead, with Amazon, Google and others running their systems on what are essentially the cheapest systems they can get their hands on, going so far as to design their own custom systems without components they don’t need, and easily replaceable power supplies and hard drives because they know these components will fail regularly.

The question now is will one concept take a hold in the opposite marketplace – will service providers start buying VBlock systems in large numbers and building large public clouds of 100,000 machines, or will enterprises start buying 1000s of customised PCs from people like Dell Cloud Computing Solutions and putting open-source solutions like Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud on to it?

Personally, while I can see some cross-over of both, I think in general the 2 solutions will remain largely separate – in the largest of public clouds, it’ll be worth the customisation effort of the service provider to build their own solution, but for enterprise and smaller service provider systems, the cost of customisation and on-going support outweighs the savings of cheaper hardware and software, plus of course the trust factor of buying a complete solution from a supplier like IBM or Cisco is crucial for most enterprise environments.