Dell Dumps Its Public Cloud Offerings

itwbennett writes "Last week, Dell said that it would be 'refining' its OpenStack plans. Now we know that 'refining' means 'backing away from'. Although the company wouldn't answer direct questions on the subject, a press release spells it out like this: 'Sales of Dell's current in-house multi-tenant public cloud IaaS will be discontinued in the U.S. in favor of best-in-class partner offerings.' Interestingly, none of Dell's initial partners, including Joyent, ScaleMatrix and ZeroLag, have platforms built on OpenStack."

At the board meeting

[Dunbal]

Someone overheard part of the conversation which went something like "it turns out that people aren't as dumb as we though they were".

It isn't cheap, nor is it easy.

[applematt84]

Building and maintaining a public cloud offering is not cheap, nor is it easy. I was laid off from my last job due to the shortsightedness of the management staff. When I started asking for licensing and support from the vendors due to unforeseen issues, as well as additional equipment due to the growth rate, the management staff realized they couldn't do it as cheaply as they wanted. I have experience building an IaaS product, and that experience tells me to just let someone else deal with it that already has the issues figured out. Linode and Rackspace are great examples. In addition, if one wants to offer a custom portal for their clients, then I suggest you write an interface that uses your vendor's API and call it a day. 'nuff said.

They couldn't get a good price on servers...

[evilviper]

Could it be that Dell discovered the hard way that their servers are, in-fact, too expensive? Companies like Dell and HP are seeing declining server sales due to projects like OpenCompute that are bypassing 1st tier vendors and going straight to ODMs for simpler, cheaper servers. Some of the companies buying these cheap servers include cloud service providers like Amazon.

Obviously Dell can't do that with their own in-house offerings, so perhaps they just couldn't compete with vendors running on cheaper servers.