Dell going gangbusters for open source cloud

Dell is pushing ahead with its plans to re-create the business as much more of a services and platform provider and move away from its long track record as a major hardware vendor, and is putting an increasing amount of its weight behind open source routes to cloud services provision.

Its latest batch of announcements take this trend further, with new developments in packaged commercial offerings in three major open source cloud areas: the OpenStack cloud project, the Hadoop open source big data project, and the Dell-led Crowbar and Dasein projects and communities, and new Cloud Transformation Services.

To help customers implement OpenStack in existing IT environments, Dell’s OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution is now available with several new options. These include support for OpenStack Grizzly, the seventh release of the OpenStack software, support for Dell’s Multi-Cloud Manager, from the recently acquired Enstratius, and extended reference architecture support.

This latter includes support for Dell’s PowerEdge C8000 shared infrastructure server solution, as well as high density drives and 10Gb Ethernet connectivity.

The company is now also offering  Dell Cloud Transformation Services. This is a new consulting service designed to provide expert assistance with assessing, building, operating and running cloud environments. It is also expected to accelerate enterprise adoption of OpenStack.

Following its acquisition history over recent years and the purchase of companies like Boomi, Make Technologies and Clerity Systems, Dell now claims that its expertise spans the hybrid cloud spectrum, with service options ranging from cloud readiness assessment, infrastructure design and operations, and application design and modernisation. The aim is that Dell customers can achieve increased efficiency and greater realisation of cloud computing’s business benefits.

On the Hadoop front, Dell is looking to streamline deployments of the big data analysis system with the Dell Cloudera Hadoop Solution. This provides supports for the newest version of Cloudera Enterprise, which has also been taken up as a partner by the likes of Oracle. The latest version allows customers to perform real-time SQL interactive queries and Hadoop-based batch processing, simplifying the process of querying data in Hadoop environments.

But the company is not putting all its Hadoop eggs in one basket. It has also tested and certified the Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop on its PowerEdge servers. The company’s Solution Centers have validated the reference architecture and developed a technical whitepaper that simplifies the deployment of the Intel Distribution on the Dell platform.

These updates come on the heels of two recent software enhancements also designed to expand Dell’s support of customers’ Hadoop investments. The newest SharePlex release enables customers to replicate Oracle data directly to Hadoop, while Kitenga Analytics provides added functionality to help organisations better understand and analyse data stored in Hadoop.

The latest release of the Crowbar operations platform provides better streamlining for configuration, deployment and ongoing management of cloud and big data environments. This includes RAID and BIOS configuration capabilities being released to the Crowbar open source community for continued community development., This completes Dell’s open source contribution of Crowbar as an operational platform.

Also available now are the Project Sputnik Cloud Launcher and profile tool and, coming soon, a free trial on the Joyent high-performance public cloud for those who purchase the Dell XPS 13 developer edition laptop.

Project Sputnik, a client-to-cloud platform for developers, is made up of three components: the cloud launcher, the profile tool, and the Ubuntu-based XPS 13 developer edition.

The profile tool is designed to provide access to a library of community-created profiles, such as Ruby and JavaScript on GitHub, and to configure and quickly set up development environments and tool chains.

The cloud launcher creates a seamless link from the client to the cloud, to facilitate ongoing development of application environments.

The company has also confirmed its commitment to further develop and support the Dasein open source project, which weas being pioneered by the recently acquired Enstratius. Dell continues to contribute heavily to Dasein, keeping it relevant to various cloud platforms and offerings within the industry.