cloud computing point of view

8/4/2019 Cloud Computing Point of View

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Cloud Computing

A Dell point of viewWhitepaper

Dell IT Management Software as a Service

THIS WHITE PAPER IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, AND MAY CONTAIN TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS AND TECHNICAL

INACCURACIES. THE CONTENT IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITHOUT EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND.


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Index

Executive Summary ............................................................................... 3

Introduction............................................................................................ 4

Cloud Computing:

Key Concepts, Terminologies and Definitions ................. 4

Taxonomy ................................................................................ 8

Feasibility and Use Cases ....................................................... 9

Dell Definition and Viewpoint .............................................. 10

Dell Products, Solutions and Services ................................. 13

Conclusion and the Dell Value Proposition ....................... 18

Additional Resources ............................................................. 18

Appendix A Dell Products and Services for the Cloud ................. 19


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Executive Summary

IT executives today face a climate of extremely challenging decision making. On the one

hand there is the ubiquitous corporate mandate to drastically reduce capital andoperational expenditures. On the other hand the speed of technological change has

introduced a different dimension of complexity into the decision making process.

Specifically, in areas that matter to IT-experts (such as infrastructure for compute, storage

and networking, management, application development environments, and software

solutions), newer technologies and delivery models under the umbrage cloud have

proliferated the landscape. At the other end of the spectrum we find that in segments such

as SMB, the cloud and in particular SaaS is shifting the decision making power away from IT

to business decision makers. Technology suppliers have only added to the prevailing

confusion with each laying claim to being cloud-ready, cloud-enabled, in the cloud,

cloud providers, having cloud software etc. This has done little to help answer questions

around capital budgeting and where businesses should focus their efforts.

Traditional thinking and literature calls out the cloud and its capabilities in myriad differentways. From a capability standpoint one hears of elasticity, multi-tenancy, utility based,

scalable technology. From an offerings point of view one definition of the cloud espouses

infrastructure as a service, platform and finally software as a service. From a manageability

standpoint one hears of provisioning, orchestration, self service portals, application stores,

metering and billing. From a deployment standpoint one is bombarded with terms such as

private cloud, public cloud, hosted offering, hosted private cloud, hybrid cloud etc. Clearly

Cloud is many things to many people. This paper endeavors to examine the landscape of

cloud computing. Additionally, Dell has been the IT executives trusted advisor when it

comes to technology and solutions within their data center. As the datacenter of the future

starts incorporating cloud based technologies in response to applications of the future, we

once again hope to make the journey with you.

Dell defines the cloud as a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to

a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage,

applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal

management effort or service provider interaction. Within this framework Dell provides

hardware, software, solutions and services to bring together numerous offerings that

address critical computing needs. At Dell we have been actively driving solutions in cloud

computing for some time, starting out as a custom tailor to the internet superstars. We

have tackled hyperscale compute issues for customers across a broad spectrum including

financial services organizations, national government agencies, institutional universities,

laboratory environments and energy producers. At the other end of the spectrum our

focus on solving issues specific to CSMB (Consumer and Small Medium Business) has

taken the form of solutions for application integration, single-sign-on (SSO), billing etc.

From data center building blocks to infrastructure management software, from platform as

a service to integration as a service and software as a service Dell provides technology and

expertise to envision and deliver custom solutions for your datacenter needs. It is our

intention that after reading this paper you have a good understanding of cloud and its

various aspects, our vision and finally our offerings.


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Introduction

Cloud computing was not born yesterday. In fact the tenets and principles that frame it

have been espoused for some time as the above quote illustrates. Cloud computingsymbolizes computing in an environment that supports multi-tenancy, elasticity, metering,

and a utility based approach to computing. If one looks at the evolution of computing we

seem to have come full circle almost. Starting with the mainframe based time-sharing

system computing progressed to a more distributed client-server model. The advent and

adoption of virtualization in x-86 based systems; a near simultaneous leap in networking

bandwidth and speeds, as well as security has led to a resurgence of a multi -tenant model

of computing in recent years. Further and unlike mainframe applications, cloud

applications can typically span servers due to resource requirements. The trend is to

leverage large scale cloud architectures on top of VMs so as to stripe an application over

multiple shared resources Dell has the necessary products, and services to help architect

cloud strategies and deliver solutions necessary to help organizations enter the cloud era.

The balance of the paper presents the Dell point of view for the cloud, as well as current

solutions and offerings.

Cloud computing Key concepts, terminologies and definitions

Our approach to categorizing the various aspects that define the cloud can be simplified

down to a 3-layered model. Figure 1 outlines this model.

Figure 1: 3-layered model describing the Cloud components

At the core lies the cloud delivery mechanism for software and or services. The next layer

really defines the implementation aspects for the cloud and we will look at a few different

models ranging from private to public and intermediaries. We refer to these as cloud

model. Finally and in our opinion what really binds these together to provide a

cloud based offering are the various service characteristics that are unique to this form of

computing. We call these cloud characteristics and look at cloud specific tenets such as

multi-tenancy, metering, resource pooling etc in this section.

If computers of the ki

I have advocated

become the computer

of the future, then

computing may somed

be organized as a publ

utility just as the

telephone system is a

public utility The

computer utility could

become the basis of a

new and important

industry.

John McCarthy, speakin

the MIT Centennial in 1


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Cloud Delivery:

There are 3 predominant delivery models for cloud services. These are based on what the

end-user consumes.

Software as a Service (SaaS): Software as a service provides an application for

consumption without requiring any knowledge of or control of the hardware, the network

or the operating system on which application runs. The point of interaction is at the

application level.

Platform as a Service (PaaS):The platform is typical of an application development

environment wherein a user can develop and debug applications as well as deploy them.

However, unlike traditional application development environments when offered as a

service the infrastructure, operating system, network details etc are abstracted out from

the end user and the developer just concerns themselves with the application and the

environment, in which they are developed, and deployed.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): The end user consumes compute resources such as andrelated to (CPU, storage, network). Some vendors provide these resources and let the

customers deploy necessary (and supported) operating systems on top, while charging

them in typical utility fashion based on CPUs used or storage consumed, or bandwidth

utilized etc.

Figure 2: Delivery models and cloud component composition

In our view the composition of the cloud components plays the critical role in howapplications and compute gets delivered. The key choices for composition are the

elasticity (static vs. dynamic) and the services (structured vs. raw) that are offered by

individual solutions. Figure 2 elucidates this viewpoint.

A composition that favors static and raw components provides more control and flexibility.

This is essential for traditional applications that require very specific configurations. The

trade-off for increased control over infrastructure is that operators must take much more

responsibility for configuration, maintenance, and scalability of the infrastructure.


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A composition that favors dynamic and service oriented components provides greater

value and automatic scalability. This is ideal for revolutionary cloud applications that can

leverage externalized state, network services and distributed operations. The trade-off for

increased value and scalability is that developers must conform to the capabilities and

limitations of the platform.

Cloud Models:

Next let us look at the predominant Cloud deployment models.

Public Cloud: Public or shared clouds typically provide services to multiple clients over the

internet while using associated access control, security, data integrity and isolation

mechanisms. Public clouds provide an elastic and cost effective means to deploy solutions

and in turn are able to transfer capital and operational savings to end users provided they

manage their capacity well.

Private Cloud: Private or dedicated clouds offer a subset of the full set of services and

greater control than offered by a public cloud. The key difference then is in the fact that ina private cloud data and process is managed within the organization that consumes it or

managed for by a dedicated hosting facility which is off premises. Clearly security

exposures are limited to those within the organization when it is an on-premise offering.

One does not have to worry about issues of network bandwidth when accessed from

within, and governance potentially provides for greater control making compliance

simpler. It should be noted here that some of the above may not necessarily hold if the

private cloud is managed by a third party and physically located off-premises as in a private

hosted offering. In Dells view this only strengthens the fact that we are still uncovering a

lot of the permutations that are possible within the realm of cloud computing.

Hybrid Cloud: Sometimes, depending on workloads in an organization, a partitioning

occurs between non-critical information and processing being outsourced to a public

cloud leaving other processing to be undertaken in the data center or in a private cloudwithin. This notion of cloud elasticity or interoperability is termed a hybrid cloud. Hybrid

clouds could also come into the picture say when extra processing cycles are needed and

the private cloud is at capacity. Offloading additional required capacity to a public cloud on

demand incurs the same hybrid functionality.

Location and control of resources is an important business consideration for cloud

deployments. Figure 3 looks at the cloud deployment models from the lens of location and

control. The location of the cloud resources allows companies to choose between on-site and hosted locations. Generally, on-site means that customers have chosento self-manage and capitalize the resources that operate their cloud. Over the lastdecade, the majority of IT spending was directed toward this type ofinfrastructure. While control has significant value, moving to a hosted modelprovides significant financial incentives by shifting IT spend as an operationalexpense (OpEx) rather than capital and increases companies ability to quicklyexpand or contract their IT spending.

The market is clearly

driving towards hyb

compositions that

combine strengths

based on the busine

drivers for the

application.


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Figure 3: Location and Control of Resources in Cloud Deployment

The control of cloud resources allows companies to choose between dedicated (single

tenant) and shared (co-mingled) resources. Shared resources is widely accepted for

software as a service.

(SaaS) implementation. At small and medium scale, the financial benefit of sharing

resources can be significant; however, sharing resources exposes questions about data

ownership and security. In addition to direct financial benefits, shared resources are

externally managed. This may dramatically reduce the IT overhead and complexity

required to deploy applications.

Recently initiatives around the need to have a common set of APIs which will provide

cloud interoperability have started surfacing. In such a scenario one could have a mix of

public and private clouds with the ability to move workloads. Cloud federation brings

together different cloud flavors and internal resources so organizations can select a

computing environment on demand that suits their unique needs.

Cloud Characteristics:

Lastly we tie together the delivery and deployment of services with characteristics that try

and define the intrinsic nature (expectation) of these services as it pertains to the cloud. It is

to be noted that at last count the author was able to list out definitions in published

research for close to forty terms. In the interests of brevity as well as keeping the

conversation focused, we provide the definitions that Dell approves of for a few keyterms here.

Elasticity:Perhaps the most touted characteristic of the cloud. The ability to scale up or

down or horizontally when it comes to resource utilization and resource provisioning is a

key tenet of cloud computing. To the end consumer the cloud is an infinite wellspring from

which resources can be sanctioned out at will and returned back, as many times and as

much as is needed. So, a production database administrator may require the former i.e.

vertical scale and achieve increased processing by adding extra compute to an existing


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database instance, whereas a web-tier in a multi-tier architecture might need to scale

horizontally by provisioning additional virtual machines to handle peak loads.

Metering and Chargeback: From the perspective of the end user this translates to pay as

you go for the services or resources he/she utilizes. From the cloud provider perspectivethis has a few added dimensions. Cloud providers need to closely monitor resource

consumption and charge users based on actual resource consumption. Accurately

achieving this, lets cloud providers have predictability when it comes to hardware capacity

planning and predictability in terms of business profits. Today the granularity of such

metering still varies from one provider to another. Some are granular to the level of a

Virtual machine (VM) whereas others refine it further to the resources allocated within the

VM. We see this particular aspect evolving with newer pricing models, newer measures for

resources used as well as actual services provided acting as inputs to metering

and chargeback.

Multi Tenancy with Resource Pooling: Multi Tenancy is the ability to service the resource

(shared hardware, shared processing, software, shared everything etc) needs of multiple

end consumers on the same physical hardware. Resource pooling at the provider end

allows for such multi tenant behavior whereby providers are able to allocate resources

from within a reusable pool as and when required. Multi-tenancy is pervasive in cloud

computing starting with the capability of consolidated hardware supporting multiple users

and varied workloads to software being designed to execute one copy while keeping user

data separate and compartmentalized.

Service Level Agreement (SLA): A SLA is a contractual agreement by which a service

provider defines the level of service, responsibilities, priorities, and guarantees regarding

availability, performance, and other aspects of the service. As cloud computing evolves this

is an area along with governance that will get much scrutiny.

Security: Security in the cloud is an important aspect and plays a key negative role when itcomes to cloud adoption. The fear that security practices in traditional IT cannot be carried

over to cloud is unfound. Most organizations already outsource sensitive info off-site. This

usually takes the form of financial data, HR info, third party credit card processing, etc.

Public SaaS is not that different. With a minimal effort one can take the existing processes

in place for validating legacy network third parties, and use it for public SaaS.

Private IaaS is not that different from legacy networking if one considers the host server a

part of the network. Security zones in this case are defined by virtual host or cluster rather

than logical network. Security tools that used to plug into the network also need to be

adapted so they work with hypervisors. Dell can provide in-depth expertise in this area. We

provide risk assessment services, design and implement security into your cloud

environment, consulting around data storage, availability and retrieval in a safe manner,

and network security.


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Cloud Computing Taxonomy

Figure 4 depicts our approach to a cloud computing taxonomy/categorization. The

diagram outlines the various components that define the cloud eco system. From the

physical infrastructure layer to administration layer the entire ecosystem of hardware and,software work in concert to provide services. These take the form of the various delivery

models such as a SaaS or a PaaS offering. Under overarching systems we place constructs

which apply across the board to such offerings. These could take the form of security and

authentication, or analytics and reporting etc.

The cloud providers and consumers partake in an exchange of a set of resource blocks

(compute, networking, software and other services), with certain expectations around

interaction (manageability, security, SLA, remediation, analytics) so as to conduct a

mutually beneficial business (billing, metering). To summarize, in our view when it comes

to delivery hardening of virtual servers and hosts, appropriate endpoint security and

logging and auditing mechanisms and deployment models there will be a lot of

intersection and a coming together rather than the discrete, unique and separate buckets

they are characterized in as of today. So for example, IaaS can easily be bundled togetherwith PaaS, or an end customer could utilize a platform to develop and deploy their SaaS

solution. On the deployment side, similarly, the boundaries between what constitutes a

private, public, hybrid cloud will become more diffuse.

Figure 4: Cloud Taxonomy A Dell Representation

So, while this pictorial is a good way of looking at the various components and their

interaction within the cloud ecosystem, it needs to be understood that both the definitions

and relationships will evolve with time.


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Cloud computing Feasibility and use cases

Having looked at cloud computing from the standpoint of definitions and terminology, a

natural question that should arise is why it took so long for cloud computing to take root

practically. Secondly what are practical use cases for these technologies in the currentlandscape? Here we briefly attempt to answer these two questions.

Given historical references stretching back decades and thought leadership of an equally

long duration what is it that made cloud computing viable? Our belief is that advances in

internet technology, processing power, software development and network bandwidth all

contributed significantly. In fact, Dell believes that we have already turned the corner on

the first generation of cloud computing. From infrastructure geared to provide cloud

services with the same or better features as in-house software and services, we are now

looking at its practicality and safety. Furthermore, we posit that the second generation of

cloud computing will extend and refine current capabilities as well as look at additional

parameters such as security of application, and data, ownership of meta -data, and

migration/interoperability across clouds with more open APIs to name a few.

From a market size perspective different studies provide their own estimates on the

revenues from cloud based offerings. While they may differ in their estimates, they are

uniformly high and growing at a fast rate. One such study from Gartner (Forecast: Public

Cloud Services, Worldwide and Regions, Industry Sectors, 2009-2014) forecasts that by

2014 the current market for cloud based offerings worth $58.6 billion in 2009 would have

grown to $148 billion. Others peg this differently. The numbers only provide directional

guidance at best. Cloud is growing fast and that is a point that everyone seems to agree

on. It should be noted that these estimates tend to be refined at regular intervals as the

field itself evolves along with our understanding of it.

Cloud computing itself is the beneficiary of customer and environmental pain points

around computing in the Internet era. The internet scale exceeds vertical scale models and

requires a new approach. Complexity while becoming ubiquitous is still not an easyproblem to solve economically and in isolation within a data center. Major trends and use

cases in IT anchor around commoditization, large scale compute environments and

associated consolidation with virtualized environments. Software caters more to a network

orientation and abstractions beat monolithic applications. Newer tenets such as elasticity

in terms of consumption (use as you need model) are the expectation and structured

platforms for development where application developers can focus on what they know/do

best will usurp the bare metal to infrastructure provisioning (server, storage, network) to

development environment and deployment model currently in vogue.

Cloud computing use cases abound in simplicity and commonly occurring end user

applications such as email and social sites (multiple vendors and platforms), to more

complex use cases such as an organization connecting to its supply chain vendor over a

public cloud application. Some typical use cases are cloud storage for backups, archival,

disaster recovery, using infrastructure services such as virtual machines in the cloud for

compute power, using enterprise level applications in the cloud such as for CRM, ERP, etc.,

building and using private clouds within large enterprises, using cloud based platforms for

application development and deployment, cloud federation and brokerage.


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At Dell we tackle the simplest of these use cases as well as help customers with their most

complex configurations and needs. Our portfolio of solutions and services are elaborated

in later sections. Here we would like to draw attention to the fact that we add value all the

way from providing tailored solutions to hyper scale cloud providers, and high

performance compute environments, to addressing unique challenges in verticals such aseducation, healthcare and federal domains, to end use cases for IT management software.

Cloud computing Dell definition and viewpoint

Dells working definition of cloud adheres very closely to that of the US National Institute of

Standards and Technology (NIST), which is a pragmatic view of how cloud computing can

be used to deliver IT resources in a new way. Much like the utility industry or the telephone

industry our viewpoint is that the end use of the resource or service should have no

bearing to how it is delivered. In a similar vein from the user standpoint there is complete

abstraction of where the resource comes from or how it is generated and transmitted. This

may take the form of sharing a multi-tenant, metered, public cloud based service delivery

of software such as payroll. It could be developers utilizing a public application

development platform that provides a software development and deploymentenvironment. Alternatively, it could be a portal that has been setup to consume compute

(server, storage and network) services from a private internal cloud. In short all of these

services are Cloud and they fall within our definition of the same. Dell respects the fact

that organizations have a significant investment in IT resources within their data centers,

and that the journey to cloud must respect this investment where possible, while unlocking

the business potential of iterative adoption of cloud computing characteristics. This is a key

tenet in our Efficient Enterprise message which supports the journey to cloud and is a

reason why our definition of Cloud is balanced and can describe solutions deployed within

the data center as it can services consumed from an external service provider.

Getting to the Cloud:

We believe there are two approaches to cloud computing. Figure 5 details the evolutionary

and the revolutionary approaches.

Figure 5: Dells viewpoint of journey to the cloud - Evolutionary vs. Revolutionary

Model for enabling

convenient,

on-demand networ

access to a shared

pool of configurable

computing resource

(e.g., networks,servers, storage,

applications, and

services) that can be

rapidly provisioned

and released with

minimal manageme

effort or service

provider interaction


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With the revolutionaryapproach we have been at the forefront working with the internet

superstars, when it comes to providing them with custom systems and data center

architecture. These very niche players take a revolutionary approach to develop cloud

native apps, designed for the cloud environment, from the beginning. They distribute

(stripe) their functionality on lots of commodity servers and build the expectation forfailure into their design. It is much like a RAID system. They are usually building cloud in

green field environments. By working with the biggest of the big, we have gained a solid

understanding of how to address the common challenges in cloud computing. We have

examined the security challenges. We have examined the networking complexity and we

have examined the inefficiencies of datacenter technologies.

The evolutionaryapproach is when you take existing enterprise applications which were

never intended to be used in a scaled out environment, and through virtualization you

retrofit them for a cloud environment. The key motivation is protection of the large

investment youve made in these apps and your expertise maintaining traditional

infrastructure. With virtualization serving as the foundation (see Figure 5), additional

capabilities are then layered on, such as usage-based-billing/chargeback, workload

lifecycle management, dynamic resource pooling, a self-service portal for users etc. One

of the key aspects of the evolutionary approach is that every step along the way, every

capability added, brings greater efficiencies and agility.

Open Cloud:

Our vision and approach to cloud computing is grounded in an open standards approach.

We believe in Open APIs because they encourage a vibrant community and reduce the risk

of lock in. This approach provides choices to the customer, enables them to leverage

existing assets (hardware, software, IT-knowledge), and increases affordability. Cloud

computing brings together a mix of heterogeneous environments as well as fast growing

and extremely variable end-point access devices and methodologies. While there are

proprietary closed solutions available today, these rarely stick in the long run; at best they

tend to lock in customers to one or a few vendors.

Figure 6: Cloud computing trends, current and 3-5 year time frame


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We believe that the specialized environments and capabilities required are best served by

solutions developed to an open standard. We are also a member of the Cloud Security

Alliance and are working with the OpenStack community to help develop a common open

source cloud platform. Dell continues to embrace industry standards and open

architectures and strives to provide value without encumbrance.

Lastly, we believe in providing capable yet affordable solutions. Capable to us means no

compromise in functionality (across all layers of IT). We work with partners such as Intel to

deliver systems targeted at scaled out cloud-environments and we work with software

partners such as Joyent which provides compelling infrastructure and platform as a

service offerings and Microsoft Azure and many others to deliver complete turnkey

cloud solutions.

Having examined the Dell point of view it is worthwhile to close this section by reviewing

where we are with regards to cloud adoption as of today. Different adoption curves may

apply depending on the segment and technology being studied. Figure 6 is one such

example of a conceptual adoption cycle as it applies to cloud computing for large

enterprises. In our opinion, today, the majority of IT in large enterprise is working with

models that are both traditional and/or virtualized, and is beginning to adopt public cloud

services. Not many organizations have made the move into the private cloud but that is

changing. The adoption of public and private clouds is accelerating and will become

dominant over the next 3-5 years. Dell believes a mix of architectures will be employed

depending on the customer specific requirements: physical, virtual, private cloud, and

public cloud. Similar adoption curves for segments such as SMB will most likely show a

strong tendency to consume infrastructure and software as a service over public clouds at

the expense of traditional in-house IT functions.

Cloud computing Dell products, solutions and services

Cloud computing is an evolving field. As such there are questions that still remain to be

answered, products and services that will continue to evolve and standards that will needto be developed. We are at the forefront when it comes to furthering our thinking in this

area, and have been active in developing technologies, products, solutions and partnered

offerings. From cloud infrastructure hardware and infrastructure management software to

supporting various delivery models for applications and platforms, from virtual desktop

services to email as a managed service, Dell will walk alongside your organization on your

cloud journey.

Figure 7 captures some key Dell offerings presented in the context of our view of the cloud

(i.e the delivery mechanism, and the deployment methodology). In the ensuing sections

we describe some of these offerings in further detail.

Defining your cloud strategyHow do you get started down the path from traditional IT to cloud computing? Dell hasspecific services to help you on the path to cloud.

1. Cloud Workshop: In this free service Dell will sit down with your IT leaders in a

collaborative working session that pairs a Dell technical expert with a customer. This

session helps us to assess the customers needs around the cloud and to figure out how

Dell can best help evolve your current IT environment.


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2. Cloud Roadmap Accelerator: After understanding the customers needs and

expectations, Dell Services helps you develop a cloud roadmap acceleratora roadmap

that charts the customers path to the cloud through pragmatic tactical steps with clear

milestones along the way. Based on your specific infrastructure, software and other IT

needs, we determine the appropriate modeland when and how to get started.

3. Design and Implementation: Dell Services supports the full range of ways in which

customers can take advantage of the cloud in their business. From helping move specific

workloads or processes to the cloud, to migrating applications, to developing and

implementing application, to fully managing the organizations complete day-to-day IT

operations, freeing up their IT department to focus on more strategic issues.

Figure 7: Dell software, solutions and service offerings across the cloud spectrum

Notes: Listed above are some core and other representative offerings. The accompanying

text talks about these as well as some of our other offerings from Dell Data Center

Solutions (DCS), Services, CSMB, IT consulting services, solutions for the cloud tuned for

verticals such as education, healthcare and the federal government, and involvement in

standards bodies. For a complete listing of our cloud offerings - products, solutions and

services please refer to Table 1 in the Appendix section of this document.

Infrastructure hardware

Dell has spent years collaborating with cloud leaders in providing cloud hardware. Dell has

custom built hardware for some of the largest hyper scale cloud providers, high

performance compute environments, Web 2.0 datacenters and gaming enablers. These

designs are extensible and available for public and private cloud deployments. Our custom

built servers have the right combination of density, memory and serviceability while saving


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power, space, energy, weight and costs. These are best suited for rack-deployments, in

large homogenous cloud/cluster application environments. We have also taken our

existing architectures which target the high end of this market and molded them for use by

mainstream Web 2.0, SaaS, cloud builders which includes hosting solutions, system

integrators, telcos and true public cloud providers. Our line of PowerEdge-C servers catersto these cloud actors.

On the storage infrastructure front Dell DX offers object based storage. This is well suited

for cloud providers as well as enterprises looking to build out a private cloud. It provides

dynamic scaling based on less expensive x-86 storage servers that are self healing and

require minimal management. The DX offering provides a clustered storage product that

scales well into the multi-PB range. In terms of objects stored the DX scales to

accommodate (virtually unlimited) trillions of objects thanks to a flat 128 bit address space.

All addresses are stored in memory and all objects can be replicated with well defined

policies across DX (global) distributions. This provides for access performance as well as

disaster recovery, and cloud bursting. Further the DX object meta -data is rich; one can

specify where the data resides, when it gets replicated and the number of replicas for

example. This again would benefit a private/public cloud offering where one may choose

to store critical data on a private cloud and other forms of data and copies externally on a

public cloud. The named-objects capability slated for a future release will provide for

multi-tenant capabilities using virtual storage containers.

Infrastructure management

From providing your hardware, to managing your IT infrastructure the transition is

seamless. Dell Virtual Integrated System (VIS) dramatically reduces the amount of timeand number of tasks it takes to manage your data center and cuts IT management costs in

half, while deploying workloads 90% faster. This capability is available without having to rip

out and replace your existing hardware (compute, network, storage) stack.

To have a truly efficient data center, you need better management across three keycomponents: infrastructure, people and process. Dell VIS addresses IT efficiency in the

virtual era by effectively managing technology as well as the people and processes that

manage the technology. It extends the benefits of virtualization while increasing the

efficiency of the entire infrastructure by reducing the time wasted on repetitive tasks. And it

helps you manage all resources physical and virtual, hypervisors, software and apps,

across manufacturers, as well as business processes and tools. VIS streamlines capacity

deployment, provides a self-service portal, allows for dynamic provisioning, as well as

resource tiering and pooling.

The system is comprised of several parts that can be used together or as decoupled

individual components:

Advanced Infrastructure Manager provides a single management point for physical and

virtual resources, allowing for polling of resources and the rapid provisioning of servers,

storage and networking assets.

VIS Self-Service Creator is an automated service delivery and management platform,

providing users an easy-to-use portal to select, deploy and manage server and desktop

resources, allowing IT administrators to automate many of the day-to-day tasks associated

with service delivery, yet still retain control while they focus on other strategic initiatives.


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VIS Directoris the IT operations hub for your virtual environment providing an end-to-end

view of infrastructure dependencies and relationships. Comprehensive trend analysis,

predictive reporting and cost analytics give a greater level of visibility into the IT

environment.

All three components are built on the Integration Suite, which is an architectural design

enabling the majority of the daily tasks to be completed from a single virtual console of

choice: Vmware, Hyper-V or Xen.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Dell understands that as applications scale, traditional development tools are replaced with

tools that address the demands of web based software. Dell provides cloud in a

box platform solutions (PAAS) that scale on-demand to meet both performance and

bandwidth requirements for web application development. This solution is perfect for Web

2.0 and eCommerce environments, Telcos and large service providers and more. A couple

of key strategic partnerships in the space follow:

Dell and Microsoft recently announced a strategic partnership to bring Microsoft Azure (a

platform to develop and deploy next generation of applications on the cloud using the .net

framework) to the enterprise market. This partnership takes two forms:

a. Dell will develop an Azure appliance to enable customers to deploy their own Azure

based clouds

b. Dell will deploy a public cloud offering based on the Azure platform to deliver cloud

based platform as a service

The Dell Cloud solution for web applications provides a similar turnkey private PaaS

offering for web applications development.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Dell provides a suite of managed services which will free up your IT department from being

an operations engine, to becoming a more strategic organization that helps your

business top line.

Our suite of products and services focuses on reducing your IT capital expenditure, and

operating costs. This is accomplished while increasing efficiencies throughout the system.

We believe this approach lets you treat IT as a strategic asset that contributes to top line

revenue growth instead of being viewed as a cost center.

Dell IT Management Software as a Service boasts over 6,000,000 end users globally and

across major industry verticals including banking/finance, major retailers, law firms,pharmaceuticals and more. Dells extensive portfolio helps customers off-load manual,

resource intensive tasks such as software license management, email management,

desktop management tasks such as patch management, backups and archival and

automate them.


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These services are characterized by:

Rapid deployment

Automatic updates, new capabilities and additional SaaS services delivery

Elasticity to scale up or down Reduced TCO when compared to a portfolio of individual applications required for

similar functionality

Delivery over the internet while not taking up significant network bandwidth and with

built-in inexpensive high availability and disaster recovery

Specific IT management offerings include:

Desktop Management tasks

Software Inventory and Usage Management

Asset Tracking

Remote Infrastructure Monitoring services

Email Management Services

Crisis Management and Alerting services

In the Small to Medium Business segment, our strategy is anchored in bringing business

application SaaS (from select third parties) to Dell customers. Were intensely focused on

solving for the barriers to SaaS adoption application integration, SSO, SLAs, billing, etc.

Other Services

In addition our portfolio of cloud offerings includes desktop and server virtualization as

well as well as hosting services, strategic partnerships and reference architectures with

data analytics and business intelligence software, as well as active participation in cloud

standards development such as with Open Stack.

Dell also provides custom offerings for key verticals in the healthcare, federal, andeducational space. For example, in the education vertical, our offerings cater to software

vendors, content providers as well as end users (K-12 and beyond and including teachers

and parents). The education sector is seeing newer business models arrive especially in

relation to how products and services are consumed and delivered. With open-source

Moodle at the core, Moodlerooms mission is to provide educators and learners across the

globe with a platform that is flexible, reliable and affordable. Dell provides Moodlerooms

with optimized hardware to administer on-premise hosting solutions as well as specialized

access to its tier 4 cloud data center. Moodlerooms is able to focus on improving the

features and functionality of its learning management offerings while Dell Cloud Services

provides clients with an infrastructure that supports infinite growth. Other such

partnerships are being planned in the software, and content delivery space.

Dells Federal Government Cloud Integration and Virtual solutions provides all of the above

products, solutions and services while optimizing and tuning them with federal needs in

mind. Dell Services has extensive experience with Federal/DOD Security and Information

Assurance issues, and we are integrating these into our Fed-specific cloud. This capability

can also be leveraged to better address security concerns of DOD/Fed in an off-site private

cloud model. These and other initiatives result in offerings that target cost reduction, agility

in deployments, and building out an extra ordinarily secure environment with scale

up capabilities.


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Cloud computing Conclusion and the Dell value proposition

Traditional data center computing which is massive and infrastructure laden, burdensome

in terms of operations, and inefficient when it comes to utilizing resources, and sluggish

when it comes to developing and deploying software and services has run its course.Nimbler, utility based, elastic, models which provide software and services through a

variety of delivery mechanisms (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, XaaS) and deployment models (private,

public, hybrid clouds) while abstracting details from end users are and will continue to

significantly overtake todays IT architecture.

We have seen that cloud computing is a rapidly evolving field a coming together of many

technologies, with user maturity, and infrastructure capabilities. At the end of the day we

still feel business value provided by this compute model will harness the technological

capabilities and evolve this field in ways so as to reduce capital expenditure, operating

costs, improve usability, and provide a richer end user experience.

We have outlined Dells point of view on cloud computing in this document. We have also

provided a snapshot of our capabilities in terms of products, solutions and services gearedtowards taking our customers on their cloud journey. Cloud is a transformation of how

we perceive traditional computing and hence about adapting to an ever changing

environment. In more ways than one it will embrace aspects of product, process and

people as enterprises make their own journey. Starting with preliminary consulting

workshops to consolidation of the data center and virtualization management, we provide

solutions at all levels of delivery and deployment. At Dell we want to use our vast

experience, thought leadership, and technology expertise in guiding our customers to

make the right choices for their compute needs as they enter this era.

Cloud computing - Additional resources

We recommend you contact your accounts manager to learn more abouthow Dell can help with your cloud initiatives. Current information can also

be obtained by visiting our website at:

http://www.dell.com/cloud

2010 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Trademarks and trade names may be used in this document to refer to either the entities claiming

the marks and names or their products. Specifications are correct at date of publication but are subject to availability or change without

notice at any time. Dell and its affiliates cannot be responsible for errors or omissions in typography or photography. Dells Terms andConditions of Sales and Service apply and are available on request. Dell service offerings do not affect consumers statutory rights.

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