He also believes private cloud architectures will proliferate. That will primarily support new development, and in some cases be used where a major application migration--primarily for homegrown apps--justifies the cost of moving it off legacy architecture.
By private cloud, Norrod means a standard way to manage a virtual server farm, that lets an IT team produce on demand virtual machines using a very simple job schedule. However, IT managers are "fairly skeptical about the intelligent cloud," he says, meaning being able to automatically provision virtual computing resources based on business policies. Data Center Solutions' goal is to shares these lessons with Dell's enterprise product groups, who will translate them to more mass-market business server needs.
Dell's creation of Data Center Solutions reflects how cloud computing is changing the server market. Microsoft was a merely average buyer of servers only a few years ago; now it has multiple, $500 million data centers with capacity for tens of thousands of servers each. There's a limit to this consolidation of server buying, since companies aren't going to move all their computing in giant public clouds. But the ability of vendors such as Dell or Hewlett-Packard to land these "whales" will be increasingly important to their server sales.
So does Dell, or any of its rivals, have a shot at Google--the white whale of this market? It seems unlikely near term, as the company looks wed to the strategy of designing its own servers. It would take a shift in Google's culture as well as its strategy. Google has had the cash flow to chase the ideas for incremental server performance itself, Mattox says, and gotten results. But like free sushi in the cafeteria, what makes sense at one stage of expansion might not for the next.
Mattox, who's VP of relationship product management, makes the case that working closely with Dell would give Google more influence on the product roadmaps of companies that make components for servers, from disk drives to processors. Google can likely get a good deal of attention of those suppliers on its own, given its influence and insight into customer needs, but "how much influence relative to someone who has 30% of the server market globally?" Mattox asks. Dell can offer suppliers true scale -- that if a component maker develops a certain product, they can reach a mass market through Dell's sales.
The second advantage Mattox says Dell brings to this competition is innovation. It's not the first word that comes to mind when most people think of Dell. But Mattox points to shipping containers as one example of its focused innovation strategy. Companies such as Microsoft are buying servers packed in conventional shipping containers, arriving at their data center ready to plug into the power and cooling systems so they're up and running in a matter of hours. Dell's research and development is focused on specific power and cooling challenges of those environments, he says.
Those containers, however, also show the bruising competition Dell faces as it fights to win the emerging cloud giants. Much of Microsoft's new Chicago data center is built around the container approach, but when Microsoft first planned the center, only two companies had the capability of delivering containers. When the center opened this fall, six vendors could, as companies scrambled to deliver whatever this giant customer wanted.
Dell's rivals such as Hewlett-Packard can offer scale and innovation as well, Mattox concedes. But he contends Dell has and will continue to be the vendor that "pushes x86 boldly to go where it hasn't before." In the increasingly important fight to supply cloud computing's giants, that's a decent start.
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Chris Murphy is editor of InformationWeek.To find out more about Chris Murphy, please visit his page. For more Global CIO perspectives, check out Global CIO. |