Expert interpretation: What is Dell's cloud strategy?

It may sound odd that Dell announced a new public cloud storage service via Twitter last week.

Dell has announced an agreement to sell public cloud storage from Nirvanix, a service company that is slowly gaining visibility, and has established a long-term partnership with IBM to provide cloud storage capabilities for IBM.

Over the years, there have been rumors of Dell's cloud strategy. Will Dell launch its own cloud computing, like HP, to counter Amazon's Web services? Dell's various acquisitions over the past few years and its enthusiastic support for OpenStack have allowed many in the industry to expect Dell to launch public cloud offerings. However, Dell has announced a Nirvanix cloud service for its customers via Twitter. Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Terri McClure said: "The news has in some ways raised more questions." ”

The Forrester storage analyst Andrew Reichman says Dell sells traditional hardware storage products for the data center, such as its PowerVault direct and network connectivity devices, and then the company's cloud computing, where customers can access from Dell's multi-tenant (public cloud) or dedicated servers ( Leased server in a private cloud. Through other distributors, Dell also provides public cloud storage software from Caringo, or manages applications in the cloud environment. "Dell's approach is to throw everything away and see which one succeeds," says Carl Brooks, 451 research firm analyst.

In this sense, he says, Dell's public cloud storage service, combined with Nirvanix, is only trying to refine the company's product portfolio. Dell wants to meet the needs of all types of cloud customers, from a service provider that uses Caringo to create its own cloud, to a large enterprise that tries to use the crowbar (a framework that Dell creates to make it easier to launch OpenStack Cloud). "They've tried everything," says Brooks, "but they're not Amazon, and they don't want to always be the runners behind IBM and HP, so they're starting to play their best to offer customers a lot of different products and services in a very simple way." ”

So does the Nirvanix agreement really mean that Dell has abandoned its plan to build its own Amazon cloud computing? Dell's representative did not respond to Nirvanix news comments, but Brooks said that if the company were to compete head-on with Amazon and other IaaS suppliers, A significant amount of money will need to be invested to build a huge data center infrastructure.

Forrester's Reichman wants to know if Dell has a competitive edge over the cloud's IaaS layer.

"Cloud computing needs to be somewhere in the data center," he says. "If Dell continues to be the" arms dealer "for reselling other suppliers ' services, they will miss the chance to compete with Amazon, and Amazon will continue to leapfrog. He added that the patchwork platform currently offered by Dell does not seem to be the ideal choice for customers. For customers, renting servers from Dell and using Nirvanix-managed object storage would be better than directly selecting Amazon Network services, automatically connecting the Flex Cloud (EC2) to resilient block storage (EBS) and simple storage services (S3), all in the same datacenter.

Given Dell's series of acquisitions over the past few years, some expect greater action from Dell. Two years ago, Dell acquired Boomi, a software company that helped simplify cloud migration, and this year Dell bought Wyse, SonicWALL and Quest, which amounted to $2.4 billion trillion. Meanwhile, other cloud moves by the company have been postponed or halted. Last year, for example, the company announced it would provide an online analytics service, but a spokesman for the company said the plan had been postponed to the beginning of next year. The company announced the platform as a service plan, but the spokesman said the plan had now been halted.

At the same time, Nirvanix is quietly emerging in the public cloud storage market. The company operates 10 data centers worldwide, Comcast, Fox and Nbc/universal are their customers. The company also signed a five-year agreement with IBM to resell Nirvanix's public cloud products. Steve Zivanic, vice president of marketing at Nirvanix company, said the white label Nirvanix Cloud Storage was ideal for IBM and Dell, although they all ran on OpenStack, while OpenStack had their own storage capabilities ( Rackspace is used to build its cloud services. But Zivanic says OpenStack is not applicable at PB-level deployments. Compared to the Nirvanix installation Foundation, OpenStack is not ready for a broad deployment. (邹铮 Compilation)

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)