Last week, Peter Wayner from InfoWorld published an online article on Dell’s Cloud; Review: Dell Cloud lets you have it your way. The post reviewed the Dell public cloud solution built with VMware technology and the various aspects of the cloud that make it uniquely Dell. As Peter stated, “Dell's new cloud has a distinctly Dell flavor that's apparent from the beginning.”
Here are some excerpts from the post that nicely highlight Dell’s features for our cloud customers:
- The biggest difference about Dell may be in the openness to the virtual machine part of the stack… With Dell, you open up your Dell Cloud portal and find a VMware vApp, described by one Dell support engineer as the equivalent of a rack where you can stick your own virtual machines… The ability to poke around at this level is liberating. You can mess around with a virtual machine on your desktop using VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion, then upload it to your virtual rack and start it up in the server farm. Most of the other clouds let you create images of your servers, but usually you end up doing the work to build the image on their machines.
- To get a feel for the speed of Dell's cloud machines, I pushed a Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine through the DaCapo benchmarks, a set of Java routines that tests many common Java server applications. As with other virtual machines in other clouds, the results varied greatly. Many of the benchmarks were 50 to 100 percent faster than an Amazon High-CPU instance (14.5 cents per hour). But others, such as the image rendering tests (batik and sunflow), ran neck and neck.
- Dell is also offering the same kind of transparency for the network configuration. You can choose between a number of different networking options for your VM once you get it running. You can configure internal and external networks, as well as reconfigure your virtual boxes in much the same way as you would your real servers. When you want your machines to speak to the outside, you can monkey around with NAT and DHCP to pass out the external IP addresses… Dell's approach will be familiar to anyone running the network in an office or an internal server farm because the steps are similar. The technologies are the same and you can use all of the flexibility if you want to do so.
As Peter concludes, “For now, Dell Cloud will be most attractive to IT staffs used to buying and configuring Dell or Windows machines in their own networks. Dell Cloud offers a wonderful amount of openness that will be familiar to anyone who's set up a rack of virtual machines with VMware in their own server room.”
To learn more about Dell’s cloud, visit the Dell Cloud website to explore our solutions for various businesses and IT needs as well as interact with the Dell Cloud team in our TechCenter Cloud Community.