cloud computing point of view
TRANSCRIPT
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Cloud Computing
A Dell point of viewWhitepaper
Dell IT Management Software as a Service
THIS WHITE PAPER IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, AND MAY CONTAIN TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS AND TECHNICAL
INACCURACIES. THE CONTENT IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITHOUT EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND.
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Index
Executive Summary ............................................................................... 3
Introduction............................................................................................ 4
Cloud Computing:
Key Concepts, Terminologies and Definitions ................. 4
Taxonomy ................................................................................ 8
Feasibility and Use Cases ....................................................... 9
Dell Definition and Viewpoint .............................................. 10
Dell Products, Solutions and Services ................................. 13
Conclusion and the Dell Value Proposition ....................... 18
Additional Resources ............................................................. 18
Appendix A Dell Products and Services for the Cloud ................. 19
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Executive Summary
IT executives today face a climate of extremely challenging decision making. On the one
hand there is the ubiquitous corporate mandate to drastically reduce capital andoperational expenditures. On the other hand the speed of technological change has
introduced a different dimension of complexity into the decision making process.
Specifically, in areas that matter to IT-experts (such as infrastructure for compute, storage
and networking, management, application development environments, and software
solutions), newer technologies and delivery models under the umbrage cloud have
proliferated the landscape. At the other end of the spectrum we find that in segments such
as SMB, the cloud and in particular SaaS is shifting the decision making power away from IT
to business decision makers. Technology suppliers have only added to the prevailing
confusion with each laying claim to being cloud-ready, cloud-enabled, in the cloud,
cloud providers, having cloud software etc. This has done little to help answer questions
around capital budgeting and where businesses should focus their efforts.
Traditional thinking and literature calls out the cloud and its capabilities in myriad differentways. From a capability standpoint one hears of elasticity, multi-tenancy, utility based,
scalable technology. From an offerings point of view one definition of the cloud espouses
infrastructure as a service, platform and finally software as a service. From a manageability
standpoint one hears of provisioning, orchestration, self service portals, application stores,
metering and billing. From a deployment standpoint one is bombarded with terms such as
private cloud, public cloud, hosted offering, hosted private cloud, hybrid cloud etc. Clearly
Cloud is many things to many people. This paper endeavors to examine the landscape of
cloud computing. Additionally, Dell has been the IT executives trusted advisor when it
comes to technology and solutions within their data center. As the datacenter of the future
starts incorporating cloud based technologies in response to applications of the future, we
once again hope to make the journey with you.
Dell defines the cloud as a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to
a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage,
applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal
management effort or service provider interaction. Within this framework Dell provides
hardware, software, solutions and services to bring together numerous offerings that
address critical computing needs. At Dell we have been actively driving solutions in cloud
computing for some time, starting out as a custom tailor to the internet superstars. We
have tackled hyperscale compute issues for customers across a broad spectrum including
financial services organizations, national government agencies, institutional universities,
laboratory environments and energy producers. At the other end of the spectrum our
focus on solving issues specific to CSMB (Consumer and Small Medium Business) has
taken the form of solutions for application integration, single-sign-on (SSO), billing etc.
From data center building blocks to infrastructure management software, from platform as
a service to integration as a service and software as a service Dell provides technology and
expertise to envision and deliver custom solutions for your datacenter needs. It is our
intention that after reading this paper you have a good understanding of cloud and its
various aspects, our vision and finally our offerings.
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Introduction
Cloud computing was not born yesterday. In fact the tenets and principles that frame it
have been espoused for some time as the above quote illustrates. Cloud computingsymbolizes computing in an environment that supports multi-tenancy, elasticity, metering,
and a utility based approach to computing. If one looks at the evolution of computing we
seem to have come full circle almost. Starting with the mainframe based time-sharing
system computing progressed to a more distributed client-server model. The advent and
adoption of virtualization in x-86 based systems; a near simultaneous leap in networking
bandwidth and speeds, as well as security has led to a resurgence of a multi -tenant model
of computing in recent years. Further and unlike mainframe applications, cloud
applications can typically span servers due to resource requirements. The trend is to
leverage large scale cloud architectures on top of VMs so as to stripe an application over
multiple shared resources Dell has the necessary products, and services to help architect
cloud strategies and deliver solutions necessary to help organizations enter the cloud era.
The balance of the paper presents the Dell point of view for the cloud, as well as current
solutions and offerings.
Cloud computing Key concepts, terminologies and definitions
Our approach to categorizing the various aspects that define the cloud can be simplified
down to a 3-layered model. Figure 1 outlines this model.
Figure 1: 3-layered model describing the Cloud components
At the core lies the cloud delivery mechanism for software and or services. The next layer
really defines the implementation aspects for the cloud and we will look at a few different
models ranging from private to public and intermediaries. We refer to these as cloud
model. Finally and in our opinion what really binds these together to provide a
cloud based offering are the various service characteristics that are unique to this form of
computing. We call these cloud characteristics and look at cloud specific tenets such as
multi-tenancy, metering, resource pooling etc in this section.
If computers of the ki
I have advocated
become the computer
of the future, then
computing may somed
be organized as a publ
utility just as the
telephone system is a
public utility The
computer utility could
become the basis of a
new and important
industry.
John McCarthy, speakin
the MIT Centennial in 1
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Cloud Delivery:
There are 3 predominant delivery models for cloud services. These are based on what the
end-user consumes.
Software as a Service (SaaS): Software as a service provides an application for
consumption without requiring any knowledge of or control of the hardware, the network
or the operating system on which application runs. The point of interaction is at the
application level.
Platform as a Service (PaaS):The platform is typical of an application development
environment wherein a user can develop and debug applications as well as deploy them.
However, unlike traditional application development environments when offered as a
service the infrastructure, operating system, network details etc are abstracted out from
the end user and the developer just concerns themselves with the application and the
environment, in which they are developed, and deployed.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): The end user consumes compute resources such as andrelated to (CPU, storage, network). Some vendors provide these resources and let the
customers deploy necessary (and supported) operating systems on top, while charging
them in typical utility fashion based on CPUs used or storage consumed, or bandwidth
utilized etc.
Figure 2: Delivery models and cloud component composition
In our view the composition of the cloud components plays the critical role in howapplications and compute gets delivered. The key choices for composition are the
elasticity (static vs. dynamic) and the services (structured vs. raw) that are offered by
individual solutions. Figure 2 elucidates this viewpoint.
A composition that favors static and raw components provides more control and flexibility.
This is essential for traditional applications that require very specific configurations. The
trade-off for increased control over infrastructure is that operators must take much more
responsibility for configuration, maintenance, and scalability of the infrastructure.
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A composition that favors dynamic and service oriented components provides greater
value and automatic scalability. This is ideal for revolutionary cloud applications that can
leverage externalized state, network services and distributed operations. The trade-off for
increased value and scalability is that developers must conform to the capabilities and
limitations of the platform.
Cloud Models:
Next let us look at the predominant Cloud deployment models.
Public Cloud: Public or shared clouds typically provide services to multiple clients over the
internet while using associated access control, security, data integrity and isolation
mechanisms. Public clouds provide an elastic and cost effective means to deploy solutions
and in turn are able to transfer capital and operational savings to end users provided they
manage their capacity well.
Private Cloud: Private or dedicated clouds offer a subset of the full set of services and
greater control than offered by a public cloud. The key difference then is in the fact that ina private cloud data and process is managed within the organization that consumes it or
managed for by a dedicated hosting facility which is off premises. Clearly security
exposures are limited to those within the organization when it is an on-premise offering.
One does not have to worry about issues of network bandwidth when accessed from
within, and governance potentially provides for greater control making compliance
simpler. It should be noted here that some of the above may not necessarily hold if the
private cloud is managed by a third party and physically located off-premises as in a private
hosted offering. In Dells view this only strengthens the fact that we are still uncovering a
lot of the permutations that are possible within the realm of cloud computing.
Hybrid Cloud: Sometimes, depending on workloads in an organization, a partitioning
occurs between non-critical information and processing being outsourced to a public
cloud leaving other processing to be undertaken in the data center or in a private cloudwithin. This notion of cloud elasticity or interoperability is termed a hybrid cloud. Hybrid
clouds could also come into the picture say when extra processing cycles are needed and
the private cloud is at capacity. Offloading additional required capacity to a public cloud on
demand incurs the same hybrid functionality.
Location and control of resources is an important business consideration for cloud
deployments. Figure 3 looks at the cloud deployment models from the lens of location and
control. The location of the cloud resources allows companies to choose between on-site and hosted locations. Generally, on-site means that customers have chosento self-manage and capitalize the resources that operate their cloud. Over the lastdecade, the majority of IT spending was directed toward this type ofinfrastructure. While control has significant value, moving to a hosted modelprovides significant financial incentives by shifting IT spend as an operationalexpense (OpEx) rather than capital and increases companies ability to quicklyexpand or contract their IT spending.
The market is clearly
driving towards hyb
compositions that
combine strengths
based on the busine
drivers for the
application.
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Figure 3: Location and Control of Resources in Cloud Deployment
The control of cloud resources allows companies to choose between dedicated (single
tenant) and shared (co-mingled) resources. Shared resources is widely accepted for
software as a service.
(SaaS) implementation. At small and medium scale, the financial benefit of sharing
resources can be significant; however, sharing resources exposes questions about data
ownership and security. In addition to direct financial benefits, shared resources are
externally managed. This may dramatically reduce the IT overhead and complexity
required to deploy applications.
Recently initiatives around the need to have a common set of APIs which will provide
cloud interoperability have started surfacing. In such a scenario one could have a mix of
public and private clouds with the ability to move workloads. Cloud federation brings
together different cloud flavors and internal resources so organizations can select a
computing environment on demand that suits their unique needs.
Cloud Characteristics:
Lastly we tie together the delivery and deployment of services with characteristics that try
and define the intrinsic nature (expectation) of these services as it pertains to the cloud. It is
to be noted that at last count the author was able to list out definitions in published
research for close to forty terms. In the interests of brevity as well as keeping the
conversation focused, we provide the definitions that Dell approves of for a few keyterms here.
Elasticity:Perhaps the most touted characteristic of the cloud. The ability to scale up or
down or horizontally when it comes to resource utilization and resource provisioning is a
key tenet of cloud computing. To the end consumer the cloud is an infinite wellspring from
which resources can be sanctioned out at will and returned back, as many times and as
much as is needed. So, a production database administrator may require the former i.e.
vertical scale and achieve increased processing by adding extra compute to an existing
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database instance, whereas a web-tier in a multi-tier architecture might need to scale
horizontally by provisioning additional virtual machines to handle peak loads.
Metering and Chargeback: From the perspective of the end user this translates to pay as
you go for the services or resources he/she utilizes. From the cloud provider perspectivethis has a few added dimensions. Cloud providers need to closely monitor resource
consumption and charge users based on actual resource consumption. Accurately
achieving this, lets cloud providers have predictability when it comes to hardware capacity
planning and predictability in terms of business profits. Today the granularity of such
metering still varies from one provider to another. Some are granular to the level of a
Virtual machine (VM) whereas others refine it further to the resources allocated within the
VM. We see this particular aspect evolving with newer pricing models, newer measures for
resources used as well as actual services provided acting as inputs to metering
and chargeback.
Multi Tenancy with Resource Pooling: Multi Tenancy is the ability to service the resource
(shared hardware, shared processing, software, shared everything etc) needs of multiple
end consumers on the same physical hardware. Resource pooling at the provider end
allows for such multi tenant behavior whereby providers are able to allocate resources
from within a reusable pool as and when required. Multi-tenancy is pervasive in cloud
computing starting with the capability of consolidated hardware supporting multiple users
and varied workloads to software being designed to execute one copy while keeping user
data separate and compartmentalized.
Service Level Agreement (SLA): A SLA is a contractual agreement by which a service
provider defines the level of service, responsibilities, priorities, and guarantees regarding
availability, performance, and other aspects of the service. As cloud computing evolves this
is an area along with governance that will get much scrutiny.
Security: Security in the cloud is an important aspect and plays a key negative role when itcomes to cloud adoption. The fear that security practices in traditional IT cannot be carried
over to cloud is unfound. Most organizations already outsource sensitive info off-site. This
usually takes the form of financial data, HR info, third party credit card processing, etc.
Public SaaS is not that different. With a minimal effort one can take the existing processes
in place for validating legacy network third parties, and use it for public SaaS.
Private IaaS is not that different from legacy networking if one considers the host server a
part of the network. Security zones in this case are defined by virtual host or cluster rather
than logical network. Security tools that used to plug into the network also need to be
adapted so they work with hypervisors. Dell can provide in-depth expertise in this area. We
provide risk assessment services, design and implement security into your cloud
environment, consulting around data storage, availability and retrieval in a safe manner,
and network security.
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Cloud Computing Taxonomy
Figure 4 depicts our approach to a cloud computing taxonomy/categorization. The
diagram outlines the various components that define the cloud eco system. From the
physical infrastructure layer to administration layer the entire ecosystem of hardware and,software work in concert to provide services. These take the form of the various delivery
models such as a SaaS or a PaaS offering. Under overarching systems we place constructs
which apply across the board to such offerings. These could take the form of security and
authentication, or analytics and reporting etc.
The cloud providers and consumers partake in an exchange of a set of resource blocks
(compute, networking, software and other services), with certain expectations around
interaction (manageability, security, SLA, remediation, analytics) so as to conduct a
mutually beneficial business (billing, metering). To summarize, in our view when it comes
to delivery hardening of virtual servers and hosts, appropriate endpoint security and
logging and auditing mechanisms and deployment models there will be a lot of
intersection and a coming together rather than the discrete, unique and separate buckets
they are characterized in as of today. So for example, IaaS can easily be bundled togetherwith PaaS, or an end customer could utilize a platform to develop and deploy their SaaS
solution. On the deployment side, similarly, the boundaries between what constitutes a
private, public, hybrid cloud will become more diffuse.
Figure 4: Cloud Taxonomy A Dell Representation
So, while this pictorial is a good way of looking at the various components and their
interaction within the cloud ecosystem, it needs to be understood that both the definitions
and relationships will evolve with time.
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Cloud computing Feasibility and use cases
Having looked at cloud computing from the standpoint of definitions and terminology, a
natural question that should arise is why it took so long for cloud computing to take root
practically. Secondly what are practical use cases for these technologies in the currentlandscape? Here we briefly attempt to answer these two questions.
Given historical references stretching back decades and thought leadership of an equally
long duration what is it that made cloud computing viable? Our belief is that advances in
internet technology, processing power, software development and network bandwidth all
contributed significantly. In fact, Dell believes that we have already turned the corner on
the first generation of cloud computing. From infrastructure geared to provide cloud
services with the same or better features as in-house software and services, we are now
looking at its practicality and safety. Furthermore, we posit that the second generation of
cloud computing will extend and refine current capabilities as well as look at additional
parameters such as security of application, and data, ownership of meta -data, and
migration/interoperability across clouds with more open APIs to name a few.
From a market size perspective different studies provide their own estimates on the
revenues from cloud based offerings. While they may differ in their estimates, they are
uniformly high and growing at a fast rate. One such study from Gartner (Forecast: Public
Cloud Services, Worldwide and Regions, Industry Sectors, 2009-2014) forecasts that by
2014 the current market for cloud based offerings worth $58.6 billion in 2009 would have
grown to $148 billion. Others peg this differently. The numbers only provide directional
guidance at best. Cloud is growing fast and that is a point that everyone seems to agree
on. It should be noted that these estimates tend to be refined at regular intervals as the
field itself evolves along with our understanding of it.
Cloud computing itself is the beneficiary of customer and environmental pain points
around computing in the Internet era. The internet scale exceeds vertical scale models and
requires a new approach. Complexity while becoming ubiquitous is still not an easyproblem to solve economically and in isolation within a data center. Major trends and use
cases in IT anchor around commoditization, large scale compute environments and
associated consolidation with virtualized environments. Software caters more to a network
orientation and abstractions beat monolithic applications. Newer tenets such as elasticity
in terms of consumption (use as you need model) are the expectation and structured
platforms for development where application developers can focus on what they know/do
best will usurp the bare metal to infrastructure provisioning (server, storage, network) to
development environment and deployment model currently in vogue.
Cloud computing use cases abound in simplicity and commonly occurring end user
applications such as email and social sites (multiple vendors and platforms), to more
complex use cases such as an organization connecting to its supply chain vendor over a
public cloud application. Some typical use cases are cloud storage for backups, archival,
disaster recovery, using infrastructure services such as virtual machines in the cloud for
compute power, using enterprise level applications in the cloud such as for CRM, ERP, etc.,
building and using private clouds within large enterprises, using cloud based platforms for
application development and deployment, cloud federation and brokerage.
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At Dell we tackle the simplest of these use cases as well as help customers with their most
complex configurations and needs. Our portfolio of solutions and services are elaborated
in later sections. Here we would like to draw attention to the fact that we add value all the
way from providing tailored solutions to hyper scale cloud providers, and high
performance compute environments, to addressing unique challenges in verticals such aseducation, healthcare and federal domains, to end use cases for IT management software.
Cloud computing Dell definition and viewpoint
Dells working definition of cloud adheres very closely to that of the US National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST), which is a pragmatic view of how cloud computing can
be used to deliver IT resources in a new way. Much like the utility industry or the telephone
industry our viewpoint is that the end use of the resource or service should have no
bearing to how it is delivered. In a similar vein from the user standpoint there is complete
abstraction of where the resource comes from or how it is generated and transmitted. This
may take the form of sharing a multi-tenant, metered, public cloud based service delivery
of software such as payroll. It could be developers utilizing a public application
development platform that provides a software development and deploymentenvironment. Alternatively, it could be a portal that has been setup to consume compute
(server, storage and network) services from a private internal cloud. In short all of these
services are Cloud and they fall within our definition of the same. Dell respects the fact
that organizations have a significant investment in IT resources within their data centers,
and that the journey to cloud must respect this investment where possible, while unlocking
the business potential of iterative adoption of cloud computing characteristics. This is a key
tenet in our Efficient Enterprise message which supports the journey to cloud and is a
reason why our definition of Cloud is balanced and can describe solutions deployed within
the data center as it can services consumed from an external service provider.
Getting to the Cloud:
We believe there are two approaches to cloud computing. Figure 5 details the evolutionary
and the revolutionary approaches.
Figure 5: Dells viewpoint of journey to the cloud - Evolutionary vs. Revolutionary
Model for enabling
convenient,
on-demand networ
access to a shared
pool of configurable
computing resource
(e.g., networks,servers, storage,
applications, and
services) that can be
rapidly provisioned
and released with
minimal manageme
effort or service
provider interaction
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With the revolutionaryapproach we have been at the forefront working with the internet
superstars, when it comes to providing them with custom systems and data center
architecture. These very niche players take a revolutionary approach to develop cloud
native apps, designed for the cloud environment, from the beginning. They distribute
(stripe) their functionality on lots of commodity servers and build the expectation forfailure into their design. It is much like a RAID system. They are usually building cloud in
green field environments. By working with the biggest of the big, we have gained a solid
understanding of how to address the common challenges in cloud computing. We have
examined the security challenges. We have examined the networking complexity and we
have examined the inefficiencies of datacenter technologies.
The evolutionaryapproach is when you take existing enterprise applications which were
never intended to be used in a scaled out environment, and through virtualization you
retrofit them for a cloud environment. The key motivation is protection of the large
investment youve made in these apps and your expertise maintaining traditional
infrastructure. With virtualization serving as the foundation (see Figure 5), additional
capabilities are then layered on, such as usage-based-billing/chargeback, workload
lifecycle management, dynamic resource pooling, a self-service portal for users etc. One
of the key aspects of the evolutionary approach is that every step along the way, every
capability added, brings greater efficiencies and agility.
Open Cloud:
Our vision and approach to cloud computing is grounded in an open standards approach.
We believe in Open APIs because they encourage a vibrant community and reduce the risk
of lock in. This approach provides choices to the customer, enables them to leverage
existing assets (hardware, software, IT-knowledge), and increases affordability. Cloud
computing brings together a mix of heterogeneous environments as well as fast growing
and extremely variable end-point access devices and methodologies. While there are
proprietary closed solutions available today, these rarely stick in the long run; at best they
tend to lock in customers to one or a few vendors.
Figure 6: Cloud computing trends, current and 3-5 year time frame
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We believe that the specialized environments and capabilities required are best served by
solutions developed to an open standard. We are also a member of the Cloud Security
Alliance and are working with the OpenStack community to help develop a common open
source cloud platform. Dell continues to embrace industry standards and open
architectures and strives to provide value without encumbrance.
Lastly, we believe in providing capable yet affordable solutions. Capable to us means no
compromise in functionality (across all layers of IT). We work with partners such as Intel to
deliver systems targeted at scaled out cloud-environments and we work with software
partners such as Joyent which provides compelling infrastructure and platform as a
service offerings and Microsoft Azure and many others to deliver complete turnkey
cloud solutions.
Having examined the Dell point of view it is worthwhile to close this section by reviewing
where we are with regards to cloud adoption as of today. Different adoption curves may
apply depending on the segment and technology being studied. Figure 6 is one such
example of a conceptual adoption cycle as it applies to cloud computing for large
enterprises. In our opinion, today, the majority of IT in large enterprise is working with
models that are both traditional and/or virtualized, and is beginning to adopt public cloud
services. Not many organizations have made the move into the private cloud but that is
changing. The adoption of public and private clouds is accelerating and will become
dominant over the next 3-5 years. Dell believes a mix of architectures will be employed
depending on the customer specific requirements: physical, virtual, private cloud, and
public cloud. Similar adoption curves for segments such as SMB will most likely show a
strong tendency to consume infrastructure and software as a service over public clouds at
the expense of traditional in-house IT functions.
Cloud computing Dell products, solutions and services
Cloud computing is an evolving field. As such there are questions that still remain to be
answered, products and services that will continue to evolve and standards that will needto be developed. We are at the forefront when it comes to furthering our thinking in this
area, and have been active in developing technologies, products, solutions and partnered
offerings. From cloud infrastructure hardware and infrastructure management software to
supporting various delivery models for applications and platforms, from virtual desktop
services to email as a managed service, Dell will walk alongside your organization on your
cloud journey.
Figure 7 captures some key Dell offerings presented in the context of our view of the cloud
(i.e the delivery mechanism, and the deployment methodology). In the ensuing sections
we describe some of these offerings in further detail.
Defining your cloud strategyHow do you get started down the path from traditional IT to cloud computing? Dell hasspecific services to help you on the path to cloud.
1. Cloud Workshop: In this free service Dell will sit down with your IT leaders in a
collaborative working session that pairs a Dell technical expert with a customer. This
session helps us to assess the customers needs around the cloud and to figure out how
Dell can best help evolve your current IT environment.
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2. Cloud Roadmap Accelerator: After understanding the customers needs and
expectations, Dell Services helps you develop a cloud roadmap acceleratora roadmap
that charts the customers path to the cloud through pragmatic tactical steps with clear
milestones along the way. Based on your specific infrastructure, software and other IT
needs, we determine the appropriate modeland when and how to get started.
3. Design and Implementation: Dell Services supports the full range of ways in which
customers can take advantage of the cloud in their business. From helping move specific
workloads or processes to the cloud, to migrating applications, to developing and
implementing application, to fully managing the organizations complete day-to-day IT
operations, freeing up their IT department to focus on more strategic issues.
Figure 7: Dell software, solutions and service offerings across the cloud spectrum
Notes: Listed above are some core and other representative offerings. The accompanying
text talks about these as well as some of our other offerings from Dell Data Center
Solutions (DCS), Services, CSMB, IT consulting services, solutions for the cloud tuned for
verticals such as education, healthcare and the federal government, and involvement in
standards bodies. For a complete listing of our cloud offerings - products, solutions and
services please refer to Table 1 in the Appendix section of this document.
Infrastructure hardware
Dell has spent years collaborating with cloud leaders in providing cloud hardware. Dell has
custom built hardware for some of the largest hyper scale cloud providers, high
performance compute environments, Web 2.0 datacenters and gaming enablers. These
designs are extensible and available for public and private cloud deployments. Our custom
built servers have the right combination of density, memory and serviceability while saving
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power, space, energy, weight and costs. These are best suited for rack-deployments, in
large homogenous cloud/cluster application environments. We have also taken our
existing architectures which target the high end of this market and molded them for use by
mainstream Web 2.0, SaaS, cloud builders which includes hosting solutions, system
integrators, telcos and true public cloud providers. Our line of PowerEdge-C servers catersto these cloud actors.
On the storage infrastructure front Dell DX offers object based storage. This is well suited
for cloud providers as well as enterprises looking to build out a private cloud. It provides
dynamic scaling based on less expensive x-86 storage servers that are self healing and
require minimal management. The DX offering provides a clustered storage product that
scales well into the multi-PB range. In terms of objects stored the DX scales to
accommodate (virtually unlimited) trillions of objects thanks to a flat 128 bit address space.
All addresses are stored in memory and all objects can be replicated with well defined
policies across DX (global) distributions. This provides for access performance as well as
disaster recovery, and cloud bursting. Further the DX object meta -data is rich; one can
specify where the data resides, when it gets replicated and the number of replicas for
example. This again would benefit a private/public cloud offering where one may choose
to store critical data on a private cloud and other forms of data and copies externally on a
public cloud. The named-objects capability slated for a future release will provide for
multi-tenant capabilities using virtual storage containers.
Infrastructure management
From providing your hardware, to managing your IT infrastructure the transition is
seamless. Dell Virtual Integrated System (VIS) dramatically reduces the amount of timeand number of tasks it takes to manage your data center and cuts IT management costs in
half, while deploying workloads 90% faster. This capability is available without having to rip
out and replace your existing hardware (compute, network, storage) stack.
To have a truly efficient data center, you need better management across three keycomponents: infrastructure, people and process. Dell VIS addresses IT efficiency in the
virtual era by effectively managing technology as well as the people and processes that
manage the technology. It extends the benefits of virtualization while increasing the
efficiency of the entire infrastructure by reducing the time wasted on repetitive tasks. And it
helps you manage all resources physical and virtual, hypervisors, software and apps,
across manufacturers, as well as business processes and tools. VIS streamlines capacity
deployment, provides a self-service portal, allows for dynamic provisioning, as well as
resource tiering and pooling.
The system is comprised of several parts that can be used together or as decoupled
individual components:
Advanced Infrastructure Manager provides a single management point for physical and
virtual resources, allowing for polling of resources and the rapid provisioning of servers,
storage and networking assets.
VIS Self-Service Creator is an automated service delivery and management platform,
providing users an easy-to-use portal to select, deploy and manage server and desktop
resources, allowing IT administrators to automate many of the day-to-day tasks associated
with service delivery, yet still retain control while they focus on other strategic initiatives.
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VIS Directoris the IT operations hub for your virtual environment providing an end-to-end
view of infrastructure dependencies and relationships. Comprehensive trend analysis,
predictive reporting and cost analytics give a greater level of visibility into the IT
environment.
All three components are built on the Integration Suite, which is an architectural design
enabling the majority of the daily tasks to be completed from a single virtual console of
choice: Vmware, Hyper-V or Xen.
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Dell understands that as applications scale, traditional development tools are replaced with
tools that address the demands of web based software. Dell provides cloud in a
box platform solutions (PAAS) that scale on-demand to meet both performance and
bandwidth requirements for web application development. This solution is perfect for Web
2.0 and eCommerce environments, Telcos and large service providers and more. A couple
of key strategic partnerships in the space follow:
Dell and Microsoft recently announced a strategic partnership to bring Microsoft Azure (a
platform to develop and deploy next generation of applications on the cloud using the .net
framework) to the enterprise market. This partnership takes two forms:
a. Dell will develop an Azure appliance to enable customers to deploy their own Azure
based clouds
b. Dell will deploy a public cloud offering based on the Azure platform to deliver cloud
based platform as a service
The Dell Cloud solution for web applications provides a similar turnkey private PaaS
offering for web applications development.
Software as a Service (SaaS)
Dell provides a suite of managed services which will free up your IT department from being
an operations engine, to becoming a more strategic organization that helps your
business top line.
Our suite of products and services focuses on reducing your IT capital expenditure, and
operating costs. This is accomplished while increasing efficiencies throughout the system.
We believe this approach lets you treat IT as a strategic asset that contributes to top line
revenue growth instead of being viewed as a cost center.
Dell IT Management Software as a Service boasts over 6,000,000 end users globally and
across major industry verticals including banking/finance, major retailers, law firms,pharmaceuticals and more. Dells extensive portfolio helps customers off-load manual,
resource intensive tasks such as software license management, email management,
desktop management tasks such as patch management, backups and archival and
automate them.
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These services are characterized by:
Rapid deployment
Automatic updates, new capabilities and additional SaaS services delivery
Elasticity to scale up or down Reduced TCO when compared to a portfolio of individual applications required for
similar functionality
Delivery over the internet while not taking up significant network bandwidth and with
built-in inexpensive high availability and disaster recovery
Specific IT management offerings include:
Desktop Management tasks
Software Inventory and Usage Management
Asset Tracking
Remote Infrastructure Monitoring services
Email Management Services
Crisis Management and Alerting services
In the Small to Medium Business segment, our strategy is anchored in bringing business
application SaaS (from select third parties) to Dell customers. Were intensely focused on
solving for the barriers to SaaS adoption application integration, SSO, SLAs, billing, etc.
Other Services
In addition our portfolio of cloud offerings includes desktop and server virtualization as
well as well as hosting services, strategic partnerships and reference architectures with
data analytics and business intelligence software, as well as active participation in cloud
standards development such as with Open Stack.
Dell also provides custom offerings for key verticals in the healthcare, federal, andeducational space. For example, in the education vertical, our offerings cater to software
vendors, content providers as well as end users (K-12 and beyond and including teachers
and parents). The education sector is seeing newer business models arrive especially in
relation to how products and services are consumed and delivered. With open-source
Moodle at the core, Moodlerooms mission is to provide educators and learners across the
globe with a platform that is flexible, reliable and affordable. Dell provides Moodlerooms
with optimized hardware to administer on-premise hosting solutions as well as specialized
access to its tier 4 cloud data center. Moodlerooms is able to focus on improving the
features and functionality of its learning management offerings while Dell Cloud Services
provides clients with an infrastructure that supports infinite growth. Other such
partnerships are being planned in the software, and content delivery space.
Dells Federal Government Cloud Integration and Virtual solutions provides all of the above
products, solutions and services while optimizing and tuning them with federal needs in
mind. Dell Services has extensive experience with Federal/DOD Security and Information
Assurance issues, and we are integrating these into our Fed-specific cloud. This capability
can also be leveraged to better address security concerns of DOD/Fed in an off-site private
cloud model. These and other initiatives result in offerings that target cost reduction, agility
in deployments, and building out an extra ordinarily secure environment with scale
up capabilities.
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Cloud computing Conclusion and the Dell value proposition
Traditional data center computing which is massive and infrastructure laden, burdensome
in terms of operations, and inefficient when it comes to utilizing resources, and sluggish
when it comes to developing and deploying software and services has run its course.Nimbler, utility based, elastic, models which provide software and services through a
variety of delivery mechanisms (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, XaaS) and deployment models (private,
public, hybrid clouds) while abstracting details from end users are and will continue to
significantly overtake todays IT architecture.
We have seen that cloud computing is a rapidly evolving field a coming together of many
technologies, with user maturity, and infrastructure capabilities. At the end of the day we
still feel business value provided by this compute model will harness the technological
capabilities and evolve this field in ways so as to reduce capital expenditure, operating
costs, improve usability, and provide a richer end user experience.
We have outlined Dells point of view on cloud computing in this document. We have also
provided a snapshot of our capabilities in terms of products, solutions and services gearedtowards taking our customers on their cloud journey. Cloud is a transformation of how
we perceive traditional computing and hence about adapting to an ever changing
environment. In more ways than one it will embrace aspects of product, process and
people as enterprises make their own journey. Starting with preliminary consulting
workshops to consolidation of the data center and virtualization management, we provide
solutions at all levels of delivery and deployment. At Dell we want to use our vast
experience, thought leadership, and technology expertise in guiding our customers to
make the right choices for their compute needs as they enter this era.
Cloud computing - Additional resources
We recommend you contact your accounts manager to learn more abouthow Dell can help with your cloud initiatives. Current information can also
be obtained by visiting our website at:
http://www.dell.com/cloud
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the marks and names or their products. Specifications are correct at date of publication but are subject to availability or change without
notice at any time. Dell and its affiliates cannot be responsible for errors or omissions in typography or photography. Dells Terms andConditions of Sales and Service apply and are available on request. Dell service offerings do not affect consumers statutory rights.