Private Clouds Seeded by Dell Servers
All the major OEMs, from HP and IBM to Oracle (by virtue of Sun) and Dell, have cloud stories to tell. Some of these tales involve public cloud services. These OEMs sell hardware to fill massive server farms, and often sell services themselves.
There is also money to be made in private clouds where internal servers are highly virtualized and managed -- and turns into services where capacity shrinks and grows based on demand.
Last time I took a close look at Dell's virtualization strategy the company was closely aligned with VMware. While it still has a VMware bent, Dell is also supporting Hyper-V, and its new line of private cloud-ready servers can go either way.
One new box is the vStart 200, which can handle 200 VMs (hence the name).
Servers are just one piece of the puzzle. The real magic is in management and orchestration, which shifts loads from one machine to next to handle computing demands, maintain uptime through failover and maximize performance. Here Dell is offering management software that works with Microsoft System Center.
How do you define a private cloud and will they live up to the hype? You tell me at [email protected].
Posted by Doug Barney on 02/06/2012 at 1:19 PM