Dell Takes On Proprietary Clouds With An OpenStack Solution

Last week at OSCON 2011, Dell unveiled Dell OpenStack Cloud, its OpenStack based solution to go against the likes of IBM targeting both the enterprise and service provider markets. While talking about Dell’s attempts against the unified computing efforts by IBM, Cisco, HP and Oracle, I highlighted how Dell is taking a more “open” approach to avoid lock-in concerns associated with such unified offerings. With this announcement, Dell has moved even further to claim open source creds as it tries to convince organizations to trust them while plotting the cloud moves. As OpenStack gains steam as a credible cloud solution, Dell is tapping its OpenStack association to position themselves as a serious player in the highly competitive cloud marketplace.

Dell’s OpsnStack solution consists of:

• A reference architecture for building hyperscale clouds on Dell Poweredge Server Technology
• OpenStack platform as the underlying technology
• An installer named Crowbar which is now released under open source license with the hope that it will be part of OpenStack project in the future. Crowbar makes installation of OpenStack cloud on bare metal servers a child’s play
• Professional services from both Dell and Rackspace Cloud Builders (BTW, when are they going to buy Rackspace?)

Dell hopes that this solution will help enterprises build private clouds and service providers build their public cloud offerings. In fact, Dreamhost has tapped into Dell’s solution while building out their highly scalable cloud infrastructure.

When I was at OSCON, I had a chance to talk to Joseph George, Director of Marketing and Rob Hirschfeld, Cloud Solutions Architect at Dell about OpenStack Cloud and Dell’s Cloud Strategy, in general. The video of my conversation is embedded below.