Last week was a VERY busy week for Dell, with one of the key announcements coming from Dell’s President of Services, Steve Schuckenbrock, that over the next twenty-four months Dell will invest one billion dollars (give or take) to build a global Cloud Computing infrastructure with ten data centers.
The Cloud data centers will be located in key places throughout the world. To begin with, Dell up upgrade existing data centers in Austin, Limerick and Frankfurt, and then open additional data centers in opened this year in the Americas (Washington DC, Chicago, Northern California and Brazil), APJ (Shanghai, Singapore, Tokyo and Sydney) and EMEA (Paris).
The Dell’s Cloud will be built using the Dell Modular Data Center from Dell Data Center Solutions (Dell DCS) which has been the backbone of Cloud and Hyperscale solutions at Dell since 2006. In this YouTube video from the Dell Vlog, Ty Schmitt, Lead Architect for Dell’s Modular Infrastructure takes us on a tour of the Dell MDC.
The initial rollout will involve email archiving through Dell’s MessageOne service, and Dell Desktop Virtualization Services. These will be available immediately. Follow the release of those services, Dell will offer IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) for both compute and storage solutions, and PaaS (Platform as a Service) for application development and deployment. The Virtualized Desktop solution will be built upon Microsoft’s Hyper-V platform.
It is important to note that while Dell is officially announcing a Dell-hosted Cloud offering, we are not looking to take over the world. According to Steve Schuckenbrock, Dell’s target is fairly specific. “We’re really not trying to go after the hosting companies that do infrastructure as a service,” he said. “There’s a lot of players out there that do that very well. We’re trying to help our commercial partners and customers.”
Bottom line, Dell is offering the Cloud to give our customers another level of service and support, and offering them a place to go with consistent and reliabile service built using best-of-breed hardware and software solutions that have been tested over and over again. It takes the guesswork out of things. It won’t be the fit for every Dell customer, and in fact, many will likely stay with an existing service provider if their needs are being met. But is is available, and as the excitement builds around the reality of what Cloud can do for your organization, it makes working with Dell, a known leader in Cloud Computing, an easy choice.
