Dell Dumps Its Public Cloud Offerings 56
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."
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this is odd. given the Dell model was a huge cash cow for them.
you know what's an EVEN bigger cash cow? selling the service - the cloud service - at a premium and actually buying the service from whoever happens to be selling it cheapest that week.
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Conspiracy theory 101 (Score:4, Interesting)
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Except that there is no mention of Microsoft. You'd think if there was a conspiracy by Microsoft to get Dell to drop OpenStack, you'd see Dell recommending Azure.
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You're describing a past which never happened; e.g. the entire point of DELL's initial business model was to compete on PRICE by marketing computers directly. By not having the overhead of a physical store, they managed to undercut other vendors, with more "traditional" sales approaches, in the fledgling PC clone market of the mid 80s. Then in the 90s they went one step ahead, and they tried to do as much "just in time" distribution as they could, in order to have as little inventory as possible (shipping d
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Using Dell and quality in the same sentence, hell - post at all, invalidates your entire argument. Go back to answer Dell Help Desk calls...your numbers are dropping. Tell them to rebuild their pc again to solve their printer problem...
You just invalidated your own argument by including the offending words in the same sentence.
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Compaq had very good WORKSTATIONS and SERVERS, but their PCs have always been cheap. I distinctly recall their later 90's PCs, which were non-standard over-sized motherboards, with all (cheap junk) components integrated onto them. They were right along side companies like Packard Bell in the race to the bottom.
Their workstations and servers, however, were
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Intel has been giving away reference designs for 20 years.
Most Dell hardware is just generic PC hardware, bought in bulk, with 'Dell' silk screened on it.
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Actually they're still the #3 maker of PCs so I wouldn't be so quick to write their obit. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_computer_vendors [wikipedia.org]
At the board meeting (Score:4, Insightful)
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ugh! (Score:1)
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Anybody else misread that as "Pubic Cloud"?
Um... no?
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How will this affect Rackspace? (Score:2)
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Why would it affect Rackspace?
Re:How will this affect Rackspace? (Score:4, Funny)
Rackspace can go to hell.
Hell is already hosted on Amazon EWS...
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It isn't cheap, nor is it easy. (Score:4, Insightful)
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After all, their OpenStack unit would have to buy equipment (presumably Dell servers), but that's just shuttling dollars from one P&L to another. They would surely need more customers footing that bill before rolling their own -- which, mark my words, is what they'll do once their P&L statements allow them.
Until that time, they'll just let the partners
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And if Linode/Rackspace's nearest datacenters are so far from your geography, that the latency is too high for internal business apps?
Re: It isn't cheap, nor is it easy. (Score:2)
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If you are really concerned about latency then a private cloud would be the best solution.,
Ah, but you see... It's not about private clouds... it's not me alone that is concerned about latency... it would be my customers that would be considering using a cloud service for their internal servers, because there are no big datacenters nearby, but my datacenter is nearby...
The big cloud providers' datacenters are far-away net-wise, so I ought to be able to service some latency-sensitive workloads
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A public cloud offering is where you have a scaleable cluster of
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A private cloud would be a single physical server on-premises, or uplinked to the clients office from a datacenter via MPLS circuit
The private/public distinction seems totally artificial then.
Does it really matter whether their internet service is residing in a VRF, with IP space routed to a VLAN on the virtualization cluster, or whether the end user has a site-to-site VPN solution, as if a VPN suddenly makes it public?
Is the distinction private/public not totally artificial?
Of course there sh
They couldn't get a good price on servers... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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...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.
Dell's public cloud problem wasn't hardware. Cloud providers buy hardware before building the service. Dell failed to stand up a live OpenStack public cloud. HP and Rackspace already have theirs running with real customers.
Building a public cloud is hard. It takes either a big company with lots of resources, or a smaller dedicated company with good funding. Both require long term commitments.
Openstack isn't particularly good... (Score:1)
While I recognize that Dell's failure in the industry doesn't indict Openstack, it's really not that good.
Every well known provider either doesn't use it, or at best uses it in a token fashion to appear 'open'. The reason is pretty straightforward, it's functional scope is sufficiently limited that each vendor is just as well off writing their own private solution. It actually takes less work to charge forward with your own implementation than go through the hoops of coordinating with a wider community c
Took them long enough... (Score:2)
And so instead of trying to capitalize on their own server production unit and compete on price, Dell's going to try and differentiate themselves using some half-assed proprietary
Not enough control of private data (Score:2)