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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.

Economy And Failure To Sell Likely To Murder Cassatt, Says CEO Bill Coleman (See Our Earlier Video Interview With The Man)

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Data center management software firm Cassatt is “close to the end,” stated founder and CEO Bill Coleman in a Forbes article. Coleman is well-known in Silicon Valley, having served as a senior exec in the early days of Sun Microsystems and as one of the co-founders of middleware company BEA systems. The ambitions with Cassatt were huge, but now (after raising $100 million in capital) the company is apparently having trouble even selling itself to one of the majors it aimed to compete with.

From the article:

“The big guys copied my story,” says Coleman. Cassatt, he adds, was upended by a slowing economy and by customers skittish about closing big orders or changing existing ways.

“What frustrates me is my own naivete,” he says. “I thought I could give companies something radical that had a proven return on investment, and they would be willing to change all their companies’ computer policies and procedures to get that. Right now it’s hard to get people to get beyond proof of concept tests or a data center energy analysis.”

And it concludes:

For his own part, though, Coleman says, “I have to think about my people. Then I’m going to a beach for a month to think about what to do next.”

We wish Coleman all the best.

Here’s a video interview we conducted with the man in the Summer of 2008:

PART 1

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PART 2

Cisco Plans Bold Move Into Server Business, Enters Arena With HP And IBM

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According to the NY Times, Cisco Systems is planning a big push into the server market, essentially entering into competition with its historical partners HP and IBM (who declined to comment on the story).

A risky move for Cisco, but a very interesting one.

The product — a server computer equipped with sophisticated virtualization software — is a bold but risky move by Cisco into an unfamiliar, intensely competitive market that typically produces far lower profits than Cisco makes from network gear. But it reflects the company’s ambition to grow beyond its roots as the so-called plumber of the Internet to offer everything from instant messaging software to digital stereos.

As The Register points out, VMware technology is likely the foundation of the virtualization part, since Cisco still owns part of the company (about 2%). Cisco is not disclosing any specifics though, but the NY Times learned that Cisco could show off the first of its new systems as early as March.

Acquisition rumors between Cisco Systems and VMware (and even EMC in full) are sure to flare up again.

A good follow-up article was published on Forbes.

VMware Planning Massive New Data Center In Washington

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According to Data Center Knowledge, VMware is planning to locate a new data center in East Wenatchee (North Central Washington), leasing no less than 100,000 square feet of space in a new facility being built by Sabey Corporation on its Intergate.Columbia campus. VMware will be the biggest leaser by far; their data center will take up about two-thirds of the 189,000 square foot second building.

Company spokeswoman Melinda Marks said that VMware will use its new data center to expand research and development.

Microsoft Eats Own Hyper-V Dog Food, Deploys Homegrown Hypervisor In Its Global Datacenters (Video Interview)

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At last week’s GigaOM VIP reception, just before their Structure 08 conference, we bumped into Arne Josefsberg, General Manager Online Infrastructure at Microsoft. He happened to be passing by in San Francisco and kindly agreed to get on record with comments on Hyper-V adoption at Microsoft. As he answered our late night questions, the party was just breaking up (hence the disturbing background sounds).

Update: also check out this article on GigaOM, since Om Malik caught up with Microsoft’s corporate VP of global foundation services, Debra Chrapaty, for a video chat as well.

Although Arne declined to put exact numbers to the amount of servers at Microsoft, he did confirm he is responsible for dozens of datacenters around the world to support the software giant’s online services. To give you an idea, Data Center Knowledge noted from a Microsoft executive that the company is adding no less than 10 000 servers per month.

Here is a datacenter lesson from Arne:

“As Microsoft obviously deploys a huge amount of processor, compute and storage capacity, [the need for] efficiency and utilization become super important to us. We work very closely with the Windows Operating system division. Hyper-V is actually becoming one of our key-technologies to drive better utilization of the hardware. We have Hyper-V in multiple datacenters in the Live-network, in production environments taking live traffic. It’s going quite quite well. So we are very jazzed about Hyper-V and virtualization as a technology to scale out our infrastructure.”

Arne’s team has been working closely with the Hyper-V development team for over a year and did not limit this collaboration to the hypervisor, but also the management tools and on how to manage hypervisors at very large scale.

When asked about cloud computing, Microsoft refers to its ‘Software plus Services’ strategy which combines software on the desktop (still the major revenue driver for Microsoft) with centralized datacenter-based services. Microsoft seems high on its hybrid flavor of cloud computing and hopes to lead the way in this nascent industry as well.

Cisco To Acquire Remaining Interest In Nuova Systems

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And why were Dante Malagrino of Cisco and Ed Bugnion of Nuova Systems jointly featured in the video presentation of Cisco Nexus 5000 we shared earlier today?

Start-up Nuova Systems operated as a majority-owned subsidiary of Cisco, which had invested $70 million and owned 80 % of the company. Cisco announced its initial investment in Nuova in August 2006 and announced an amendment to the agreement in April 2007 that expanded the development scope, increased the funding commitment and raised the maximum potential payout of the transaction to $678 million. And now Cisco has formally expressed its intent to acquire remaining interest in the company.

Cisco logo

Nuova Systems

From the press release:

“Cisco today announced its intent to purchase the remaining 20 % interest in San Jose-based Nuova Systems, a start up focused on the development of next-generation products for the data center market. Cisco today also introduced the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series, the first product developed by Nuova. The Cisco Nexus 5000 is a 10 Gigabit Ethernet “top-of-rack” switch that offers unified fabric capabilities through the support for multiple data center networking protocols and software intelligence.”

The Nuova transaction is success-based with the total value primarily determined by the revenue of Nuova products over three measurement periods. The first measurement period will commence in early fiscal year 2010, the second measurement period will commence in late fiscal year 2010, and the third measurement period will commence in mid fiscal year 2011. The acquisition is expected to close in Q4 of Cisco’s FY 2008. It will be acquisition No. 126 for Cisco overall and the fifth one in FY ’08.