Q&A: Dell wants to storage deployment as easy as servers
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Praveen Asthana, director of Dell storage, says his company is focused on reducing deployment costs and the complexity of storage so storage is as easy to install as servers are right now.
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Dell CEO Michael Dell&#160;plans to announce a series of new products aimed at making life easier for IT managers.The announcement of these products is scheduled to happen during a keynote by Dell at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco Nov. 14.&quot;What you&#39;re going to hear Michael talk about ... is some real products and services coming down the pipe here very shortly on how we simplify IT for customers of all sizes,&quot; said Brad Anderson, senior vice president and general manager of Dell&#39;s Business Products Group, during an interview.Among the products and services that Dell plans to announce are a cheaper and simpler virtualization product, new blade servers for large datacenters, and IT support services for small companies that face the same challenges confronted by corporations with large IT departments but don&#39;t have the same resources, Anderson said.The ultimate aim of these products and services is to help reduce the costs companies bear when they purchase new computers or roll out new software applications.&quot;You&#39;ve got to think about how customers procure [IT products like a server], how they deploy it, how they manage it on an ongoing basis, how they dynamically reconfigure it for their changing requirements, and maybe how they retire it,&quot; Anderson said. &quot;How can we really streamline and simplify each step of that lifecycle so the customer invests less of his or her money to go do those things?&quot;This effort to make lives easier for IT managers will start at the manufacturing level, where Dell is offering customers the ability to have PCs and servers shipped with software applications pre-installed and tested, Anderson said.&#160;
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CIOs at Enterprise Management World see server consolidation as a way to reduce management complexity in data centers and avoid the need to buy more server hardware.
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When Amazon introduced S3 a couple of years ago I knew I would useit and I was sure a lot of other developers would. I saw it as a solution to a problem we all have -- storage that scales up when needed, and scales down when not. Otherwise we all have to buy as much bandwidth as we need in peak periods. With S3, you pay for what you use. It makes storage for Internet services more rational. Later they did the same for processors and queuing. And a couple of days ago they announced a lightweight scalable database, using the same on-demand philosophy and simple architecture and API. It's going to be a huge hit and forever change the way apps are developed for the Internet. I was explaining the significance of this to Scoble on the phone this morning. It's worth repeating here. When I developed Frontier in the late 80s and early 90s my target platform was a modern desktop computer, a few megabytes of RAM, a half-gig of disk, a few megahertz CPU. A system capable of running Quark XPress, Hypercard or Filemaker. It would be used to develop apps that would drive desktop publishing. Later, it was used to generate static websites, then a demonstration of democracy (a multi-author ultra-simple CMS), then news sites, which became weblogs, then blogs, and editthispage.com, Manila, weblogs.com, and that's when scaling became an issue. (Later we side-stepped the scaling issue by moving most of the processing to the desktop with Radio 8.) As we approached then cracked ease of use in web authoring, scaling became an issue, then the issue. A Manila server would work fine for a few thousand sites, but after that it would bog down because the architecture couldn't escape the confines of a single machine it was designed for in the 80s. (Before you say it's obsolete, there still are a lot of apps for single machines. Perl, Python, JavaScript and Java share the same design philosophy.) Same with weblogs.com. It worked great when there was a few thousand blogs. Once we hit 50K or so, we had to come up with a new design. Eventually we were tracking a couple million, and Frontier was hopelessy outclassed by the size of the problem. If only Amazon's database had been there, both Manila and weblogs.com could have been redesigned to keep up. It would have been a huge programming task, but it would have made it economically possible.  Today, when a company raises VC, it's probably because their app has achieved a certain amount of success and to get to the next level of users they need to spend serious money on infrastruture. There's a serious economic and human wall here. You need to buy hardware and find the people who know how to make a database scale. The latter is the hard problem, the people are scarce and the big companies are bidding up the price for their time. Now Amazon is willing to sell you that, to turn this scarce thing into a commodity, at what likely is a very reasonable price. (Haven't had time to analyze this yet, but the other services are.) Key point, the wall is gone, replaced with a ramp. If you coded your database in Amazon to begin with you will never see the wall. As you need more capacity you have to do nothing, other than pay your bill.  Further, the design of Amazon's database is remarkably like the internal data structures of modern programming languages. Very much like a hash or a dictionary (what Perl and Python call these structures) or Frontier's tables, but unlike them, you can have multiple values with the same name. In this way it's like XML. I imagine all languages have had to accomodate this feature of XML (we did in Frontier), so they should all map pretty well on Amazon's structure. This was gutsy, and I think smart.  They're going down a road we went down with XML-RPC and then SOAP. There may be some bumps along the way but there are no dead-ends, no deal-stoppers. All major environments can be adapted to work with this data structure, unless I'm missing something (standard disclaimers apply). Their move makes many things possible. As I said earlier, if it existed when we had to scale weblogs.com, we would certainly have used it. One could build an open identity system on it, probably in an afternoon, it would be perfect for that. A Twitter-like messaging system, again, would be easy. It's amazing that Microsoft and Google are sitting by and letting Amazon take all this ground in developer-land without even a hint of a response. It seems likely they have something in the works. Let's hope there's some compatibility.
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I can imagine the mass deployment of virtualized storage controllers. The heyday of RAID controllers is coming to an end. It has me thinking about the mass consumption of virtualization, which leads me to another thought: the mass deployment of embedded virtualized processes.
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This paper introduces some techniques for making backups without needing to stop the business applications. It also describes ways to simplify and reduce the cost of system operations.
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Dell releases its Dell EqualLogic PS5000 Series storage-area network arrays.
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Dell will roll out a line of servers preconfigured with Microsoft's SQL Server database.
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Plug and RAID SGI has popped out a new low-end storage system that it bills as its "easiest-to-deploy" "plug-and-play" box to date.â¦
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Microsoft and Dell are looking to merge their Systems Management Server and OpenManage suites to create a powerful, easy and cost-effective server management solution.
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com November 17, 2004, 5:03 PM PT. Organizations are replacing aging servers with newer more-powerful boxes, often Linux--based, and theyâre also investing in storage.
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Dell has teamed up with cluster-management app-maker Platform Computing Inc. to create a small but powerful rack-mounted server complete with open-source cluster-management tools.
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Continuing the thread on commoditization of scalable server software, the third installment. Yesterday, Matt Tucker from the OpenFire community, said: "I'm not sure that S3 magically kills off the scaling priests. It certainly makes it easy to turn on more storage resources, but writing an application to scale efficiently across multiple virtual machines is no easy task." To which I responded... It won't make scaling obsolete, but what it does do is commodify it. Right now I can't buy a Jabber server that scales without also hiring someone who will scale it for me. But in a few years I should be able to buy a Jabber server that, when it needs more CPUs, just asks for them all transparently to the user, the same way my word processor asks the OS for more memory today. I remember word processors that didn't do memory management, you got a 64K buffer and that's it. One document. When you filled it up, you started another. Technology will go forward and scaling won't be a black art, it'll be something built into the software you license.
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(Source: MessageLabs)Administrators struggle with ever increasing complexity in the data center. Join Brian Babineau, Enterprise Strategy Group and Anne O'Neill, Symantec Corporation for an evaluation of these options and the discussion of Veritas Server Foundation from Symantec, a novel approach to Data Center Automation that embodies Symantec's vision for a solution to DCA that is both complete and simple. We invite you to register now for full access to this online broadcast.
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Host Depot announced today that they are launching a new next generation dedicated server offering. The new products will be powered by Dells' new PowerEdge(TM) server line.
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After talking up its new line of blade servers for months, Dell went ahead today and delivered some product. Dell, not surprisingly, is touting its new blade server as a space and cost-saving improvement over standard 1U rack servers.
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(Source: 3PAR) Here's an information-packed white paper from TheInfoPro (TIP) that delivers findings from one-on-one interviews with Fortune 1000 storage professionals. The paper explains how the deployment of tiered storage has driven the need for data migration in Fortune 1000 companies, and why those enterprises are now looking for more mature storage solutions that minimize complexity while harnessing the full value of tiered storage. It's must-read research for IT strategists who are looking to meet their business drivers for low-cost storage and high availability.