What exactly is Dell's 1 billion Dollar cloud expansion plan?

Dell said last week that it would opt out of the public cloud and instead support other partners ' services. But Dell has announced plans to invest 1 billion of dollars in its data centers to support its public cloud offerings. And now that Dell is out of the field, what happens to Dell's infrastructure?

Last week, Dell said it had abandoned its current public cloud services and instead supported other partners ' services. Most of the talk now revolves around what this means for OpenStack, but what does it mean for Dell to invest 1 billion of dollars in the data center?

As early as 2011, Dell announced plans to invest $1 billion in its data center to provide public cloud products. The company plans to build 10 data centers within 2 years, which is a very positive plan. However, as Dell abandons the public cloud it provides directly, most of the infrastructure that will be placed in these data centers has now disappeared.

Has Dell renewed a strong expansion plan for its data center? If not, it shows that the previous plan has changed dramatically with its abandonment of the public cloud. If the company has or will invest the money in infrastructure, where will it be used? Dell has not responded to these questions.

What we know about Dell deployments in Quincy and Slough

Dell rarely announces its data center expansion publicly, so let's look at what we already know:

At the end of 2011, Dell's data center in Slough, UK, was officially enabled. The space in the data center is not very large, more than 5,000 square feet of space is divided into two parts--one of which is an active floor area with rows of cabinets, hot channel seals and linear cooling units, and the second part is the IT capacity area, which is installed in the Dell Modular Data Center (Dell Modular Data Center). The Slough facility, which is deployed by retrofitting the existing structure, will meet the Tier III reliability standard and the Power efficiency (PUE) is about 1.5.

In Quincy, Washington, Dell bought 80 acres of land and plans to build a 350,000-square-foot data center. This is an important part of Dell's expansion of its global data Center program, which is designed to help companies aggressively move into cloud computing services. The first phase of the project, released in February 2012, has a 40,000-square-foot data center space.

Last year, a Dell executive said Dell plans to set up 20 data centers in the Asia-Pacific region, which will be first implemented in India. In 2011, Dell CEO Michael Dell admitted that the company would set up a data center in Australia.

Dell's Strategic shift

The plan aims to promote its cloud offerings at three levels of the cloud market, including computing and storage offerings on the infrastructure as a service (IaaS), the development and deployment of applications on platform as a service (PaaS), and a SaaS-level virtual desktop services offering.

A few weeks ago, Dell acquired Enstratius, which greatly deepened its cloud management capabilities. Given the development at the enterprise and platform level, it is meaningful for Dell to abandon the public cloud. There are a lot of competitors in the public cloud, including AWS, Google, Microsoft, Rackspace, and every day new companies join the competition (VMware is the latest example). By providing its own public cloud, Dell threatens to erode part of the market share, but Dell's positioning of its products complements its partners. Abandoning the plan means there is no longer any potential conflict of interest between Dell and its partners, and it can provide products to these partners in a completely free way. But that poses a problem--what about infrastructure?

Dell's move to a modular datacenter means it may not have done as it had promised. Dell does have some plans to fill the data center's service space. It still believes in the growth of the public cloud, but it does not directly provide data centers.

"Many Dell customers plan to expand the public cloud they use, but to really benefit from it, they want a vendor choice, with flexibility and interoperability across platforms and models, to compare the benefits of the cloud and workload performance, and to have an aggregated approach to managing it," Dairyun Vice President Nnamdi "The partner approach delivers higher value to Dell's customers, channel partners, and shareholders as part of our comprehensive cloud strategy, delivering a market-leading, end-to-end cloud solution," Orakwue said after Dell abandoned the public cloud. ”

Abandoning the public cloud-this is a sensible strategy. Yet the $1 billion trillion in funding now begs the question-what will happen to Dell's infrastructure?