April 2008 - Posts

• Welcome to the party!

  Wed. Apr. 23, 2008
  by Todd Brannon, Dell Data Center Solutions
  Today marked the announcement of another entry into the foray of "new" systems designed for cloud computing.   I make light of "new" as this is a space Dell has been serving for over a year now.    And along the way we've found that the unique needs of hyperscale customers demand a hands-on (and often very discreet) co-development approach.   Power and space savings vs. general purpose servers in the magnitude of those quoted in the press today are really just the ticket to entry into these environments.   I'm glad IBM shares Dell's appreciation for that.  

  One element of today's announcement I'd like to call into question is what is being presented to customers as "entirely new" - things like door panel cooling, half-depth servers and proprietary racks.    Who are these "innovations" really benefitting when they're not built on industry standards in the end? Is it the customer or the system provider's bottom line? Cooling is an incredibly complex topic - that heat has to be rejected somewhere and there are no silver bullets.   The best solutions are often rooted in the basics - hot/cold air containment, higher return temps etc... and we have found that a lot can be done even in hyperscale cloud computing environments without adding a lot of unnecessary complexity.

  From a marketecture standpoint I have to give a tip of the hat to the Blue Cloud initiative although I don't sense tangible benefits for any customers yet.   Leadership is delivering.  The top 5 search engines (in the U.S. market) are Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and ASK.  It's widely known that Google builds their systems in-house.  Of the remaining top five, three have worked with Dell in the past year to co-develop their servers with our Data Center Solutions team.   Not a bad start considering the dawn of customized, build-to-order cloud computing servers just came today.... 

   
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• Cloud Computing Model

  Thu. Apr. 10, 2008
  by Jimmy Pike, Director—System Architecture

  Probably the best next step for this discussion is to begin to build a top to bottom model of Cloud Computing.  I think there are about 12 major pieces to it so this is going to take a while.  As I mentioned earlier, “Cloud computing”, I believe, may in fact become the basis for most modern IT services in the next few years.  We also put forth this definition with which most folks seem to agree……“Cloud computing” -  packaging of computing resources in a manner that will provide lower acquisition cost of hardware and in a way that provides a set of optimized services to the end user via the Internet in the most cost effective, operationally efficient means possible.   So I took a stab at the model for this which is shown here:

  

  At this point it is certainly OK to disagree! …. In fact, I have found myself arguing with myself about it already. :o)  So we’ll pause here and let folks take this in.  Then we will start layer by layer to make sure is correct.  My hope is not only can we build an agreeable model at the technical level, but a financial model from which we can get TCO and other information.  Feel free to comment…

   
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• Infrastructure challenges for cloud platforms

  Tue. Apr. 01, 2008
  by Todd Brannon, Dell Data Center Solutions

  One of the topic areas we'd like to talk about is the impact of power and cooling trends on hyperscale operations.  As the size of scale-out platforms grows ever larger, server designs continue to drive for increased density.   In this first post to our power and cooling section, Drew Schulke of the DCS Services team takes a look at some of the factors impacting organizations that house high-density systems in a co-location facility.  If you house a large compute pool based on blades or other high-density solutions in a colo facility please take a look at Drew's post and tell us what you're seeing.
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