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Dell Invests $1 Billion In Cloud Data Centers, Service Enhancements

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Dell today announced it is increasing its investments in new technology solutions and services.

In its current fiscal year, Dell will invest $1 billion to deliver solutions, services and cloud-based delivery options to help customers capture the benefits from new compute and information delivery advancements.

Over the next 24 months, Dell will build multiple data centers around the world to provide its customers access to public and private cloud technologies and its IT outsourcing capabilities. These new data centers will allow customers to take advantage of Infrastructure-, Platform- and Virtual Desktop-as-a-Service offerings as well as IT outsourcing.

Dell will open 12 Global Solution Centers this year and is planning 10 more over the next 18 months, to better bring open, capable and affordable solutions to organizations around the world. This global network of solution centers will provide a backdrop for customers to learn about Dell’s industry-focused solutions and domain expertise.

Announced today, Dell vStart accelerates and simplifies virtualization adoption by providing an easy way to purchase a complete virtual infrastructure solution delivered ready to run physical and virtual workloads. With vStart, an entire functioning virtual infrastructure solution is delivered ready to run up to 100 or 200 virtual machines from a single management environment – including Intel Xeon-based Dell PowerEdge servers, Dell EqualLogic storage, Dell PowerConnect switches, deployment services, hypervisors, and essential virtualization management extensions.

Dell vStart currently supports VMWare and support for other hypervisors is planned in the coming quarters.

Also today, Dell and Microsoft announced a three-year strategic initiative to help customers quickly deploy and manage virtualization and private cloud technologies. Management solutions will be based on Dell’s Virtual Integrated System, Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager and Microsoft System Center and will deliver improved integration across the physical, virtual and application layers. Virtualization solutions will be based on Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V.

Future jointly-engineered solutions based on Dell’s hardware and virtualization management technologies and Microsoft’s hypervisor and systems management technologies will simplify virtualization management, reduce costs and remove barriers to cloud adoption.

45 Organizations Team Up For Cloud Standards Customer Council for Open Cloud Computing

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OMG, an international, open membership, not-for-profit computer industry consortium, today announced the formation of the Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC).

OMG is also announcing that CA, IBM, Kaavo, Rackspace and Software AG have joined the CSCC as Founding Sponsors.

The Cloud Standards Customer Council is an end user advocacy group dedicated to accelerating cloud’s successful adoption, and drilling down into the standards, security and interoperability issues surrounding the transition to the cloud.

More than 45 organizations including Lockheed Martin, Citigroup and North Carolina State University have already joined the Cloud Standards Customer Council. The Council will provide cloud users with the opportunity to drive client requirements into standards development organizations and deliver materials such as best practices and use cases to assist other enterprises.

Membership is free for qualified end-user organizations. Vendors may join as sponsors.

Cloud Computing Markets Projected To Reach $17 Billion by 2016

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MarketResearch.com has announced the addition of Wintergreen Research’s new report “Cloud Based Office Productivity Software Market Shares, Strategies, and Forecasts, Worldwide, 2010 to 2016” to their collection of Internet Applications market reports.

Virtualization of software and servers creates ways to generate more effective automated control of personal and team business data. Cloud systems manage personal productivity: word processors, spread sheets, presentation logic, and collaboration tools available online.

Software is needed for management and sales implementations of different productivity tasks in different industries. Group cooperation is supported with the systems.

According to the report, IBM Lotus is positioned to support office productivity beyond the desktop and outside data centers. Businesses are generating 15 petabytes of new information each day. There is a massive increase of connected devices used to work with that data.

Systems are optimized for remarkably diverse workloads managed by businesses, organizations, and governments. IBM offers flexible sourcing options including cloud computing.

Google Apps are considered the premier offering for cloud based office productivity systems. There is a fundamental difference between to personal computer client offerings and the cloud offerings. The cloud offerings are tuned to leverage the flexibility and collaboration achievable from groups working online together. Cloud based systems operate from memory and are designed to be instantly available. Personal client device office productivity software systems provide a more elaborate feature function package funded and supported by a large installed base, reports Wintergreen.

Cloud computing provides support for collaboration. Collaboration is supported by Google Apps and Google Docs. Users can edit documents at the same time, creating a compelling team based system, permitting managers to get all members of the team involved in thinking about and designing project.

Cloud computing strategy is positioned to help organizations make a transition from siloed personal data to a shared virtualized data center in an evolutionary manner. Not every enterprise is ready for a move to cloud computing. IT organizations want to evolve from datacenter architectures to cloud computing. Premise investments are being leveraged.

According to the report, vendors are thinking beyond the desktop and outside data centers to supporting the evolution of business across national boundaries, providing a global reach to marketing departments. Cloud office productivity tools support that strategy.

Office productivity software enables use of computers intuitively. Continuous systems upgrades improve the functions available to users. Businesses are generating 15 petabytes of new information each day. There is a massive increase of connected devices used to work with that data.

As systems are optimized for remarkably diverse workloads managed by businesses, organizations, and governments, office productivity systems play a part in generating useful information sharing. Flexible sourcing options including cloud computing are being used to generate team documents.

The major management objectives for this critical area of office productivity applications implementation include words, numbers, image, and video content management. Cloud based systems are simple to use and collect different types of information in a cohesive manner.

The fundamental aspect of cloud office productivity applications implementation relates to flexibility. The ability to be responsive to changing market conditions is central to the modern IT team collaboration task. The desire for systems that support flexibility is anticipated to spur rapid growth of cloud computing office productivity systems.

Cloud productivity office computing markets at $3.3 billion in 2009 are anticipated to reach $17 billion by 2016.

Cloud.com, a new Open Source Cloud management platform..

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With a domain like Cloud.com you are doomed to deliver something Virtualization related,

And today that plan became visible for the rest of the world, the company formerly known as VMOps , today emerges from stealth mode and announces that it will be rebranding to Cloud.com

We had a chat earlier this week with Peder Ulander who joined Cloud.com as chief marketing officer bringing more than 15 years of experience. Previously, Peter could be found at companies such as Sun Microsystems responsible for launching Java into the open source market by re-licensing, building a community and launching the open source Java platform. but also at other Open Source companies icluding MontaVista Software, the largest distributor of Linux for embedded devices, and Cobalt Networks, one of the early open source for networking companies, Cisco and Symantec.

Next to Peter the company also announced two other new additions to it’s management team

Kevin KLuge joins as vice president of engineering and previously served as vice president of engineering at Zimbra, an open source server software provider for email and collaboration, which was acquired by Yahoo! in 2007 and sold to VMware in 2009. Prior to Zimbra, Kluge was vice president of engineering at Corvigo, a leading anti-spam provider. Additionally, Kluge has held leadership positions at Openwave Systems, where he led engineering for multiple innovative products including instant messaging, voicemail and multi-media messaging services (MMS), Sun Microsystems and Portola Communications.

and Kyle MacDonald joins as chief evangelist having most recently served as vice president of corporate development and strategy for Hosting.com / Wachovia Capital Partners. Prior to this position, MacDonald held executive leadership positions at Sun Microsystems including leading the Web 2.0, Internet and next generation service providers sector at Sun Microsystems, acquired by Oracle in 2009. MacDonald also held the position of corporate technologist for software and strategic technology at AMD where he helped developed AMD’s software strategy and key strategic alliances with companies such as IBM, BEA, Adobe, EMC and Symantec.

The new team members join the team of CEO Sheng Liang, who founded the company in 2008. Liang has extensive experience in the technology industry and has served in a number of both technical and executive leadership roles. Prior to Cloud.com, Liang co-founded and served as CTO of Teros, which was acquired by Citrix in 2005. Sheng also was a member of the senior management teams at SEVEN Networks and Openwave Systems, and was the lead developer and key contributor to the success of the Java Virtual Machine at Sun.

Cloud.com also lets the Virtual world know that it closed a $11 million Series B round led by new investor Index Ventures. Current investors Redpoint Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners also participated in this round, bringing the company’s total funding to date to $17.6 million

Apart from its new name, management and funding Cloud.com today also announced their product : CloudStack,
an open source software solution that accelerates the deployment, management and configuration of private and public cloud services. They provide an integrated software solution for delivering infrastructure as a service (IaaS) which comes in three distinct versions: CloudStack Enterprise Edition, CloudStack Service Provider Edition and CloudStack Community Edition.

CloudStack is the result of work started by VMops in 2008 and is already being used in productions by some key customers.

Next to the expected features such as definition, deployment and management of cloud devices, CloudStack also adds metering to the feature list, so billing can be done based on actual usage of the public , private or hybrid deployments.

About the Open Source release availabel on Cloud.com tells us :
The CloudStack Community Edition is distributed under the General Public License 3 (GPL3). The Community Edition offers a leading open source software stack integrated with the open source Xen and KVM hypervisors, and can be deployed with Ubuntu and Fedora distributions. With its simple to install software package, Cloud.com is a fully integrated binary that enables developers to quickly and easily build, manage and deploy IaaS clouds.

There is a lot of competition in the Open Source Cloud and Virtualization management area, Corporate OpenQRM just being relaunched by Matt Rechenburg, Eucalyptus these days being managed by Marten Mickos and Abiquo just having opened a new office in the US, … and this all seems just like the start

So I`m keen to follow this one … and I’ll be having a closer look at the Cloud.com platform in our lab soon.