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Day 1/ Session
Moving into the Cloud
Phil Davis, VP Solutions, APJ, Dell explained what
cloud computing was all about, touched on the latest trends and made a case
for why the CIOs present should choose Dell as their cloud services provider
 Davis
kicked off his presentation by talking about the four S’s of Software,
Storage, Servers and Services. He mentioned that Dell did business to the tune
of $61bn in the previous fiscal and that it shipped a computer, every second
of every day. “In the next 30 minutes, we’re going to ship 2,000 computers,”
he quipped. Moving on to Dell’s Indian operations, he said that, “Our
Indian business is now worth $900mn.” He zeroed in on services and said
that almost one in three of those dollars came from the solutions business.
After touching upon the pressures faced by CIOs, he went on to talk about Cloud
Services which he argued were an alternative for the pain of overgrowth of infrastructure
and managing it in house.
The key focus points for a CIO were competitiveness, control and choice. “Take
CAPEX and change that to OPEX and scale it up and down,” he advised. Control
was a big barrier in moving to the cloud. A few years ago, ASPs stumbled on
account of lack of bandwidth and inadequate control. “As we move forward
we see control of the data being less of an issue in some parts of the infrastructure.
Some parts are still sensitive. If I can abstract my applications from my hardware,
then I can migrate them across hardware and vendor platforms and really optimize
cost,” he commented.
Instead of wholesale outsourcing of the complete infrastructure to the cloud,
adoption is taking place around particular focused areas.
He defined cloud computing as follows:
- The hardware management is done by the provider
- You should be able to scale and drive that infrastructure
independent of your investment in people and your investment in the infrastructure.
- A granular, consumption-based model is also a key
element of cloud services.
Davis listed the popular variants of Cloud Computing:
- Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): “The big success
around that would be Salesforce.com. We adopted it at Dell about a year ago,”
said Davis.
- Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): You take the
service up to an OS level with on-demand storage in the cloud. Take financial
solutions and run them on the infrastructure and get back the results, e.g.
Rackspace.
- Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): A gaming company in
China put up the hardware and the ISVs pay for access to that platform. The
revenue is shared between ISVs and the gaming company in this model.
He went on to say that all three of the above examples were Dell customers and
that the company had invested over $500 mn in building up its cloud services
team.
“Variation is costly. You need to be standardized. Having different OSs
etc. adds to your cost. Take a server today vs. a server two to three years
ago and you can drive five to six times the performance from today’s server.
A year back, 5% of CIOs had employed virtualization for their production apps,
10-15% for test & dev and 80% were not using the technology at all. Today
20% of them have virtualized production and 30% have deployed this technology
for test & development,” he said.
He talked about private and public clouds and making the
right choice. “A private cloud can be done on premise. But the question
you have to ask yourself is whether you have the resources and capabilities
to do this? Or would it be better to host your application in a private cloud
and offload the hosting cost to a third party?”
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Data management has been among the toughest issues for K Y Iyer, Head-IT,
NDTV who is judiciously using technology to consolidate it effectively
The top challenge for Iyer has been managing user data both from traditional
sources and the data emanating through video which is about 20x more than
that of data from e-mail or other users.
"Adhering to compliance in the process of protecting every individual’s
data, protecting services while consolidating the same given the two refresh
cycles of this data, volumes of scale, online real-time protection of
data and management are all critical issues in such a framework,"
maintained Iyer.
Another task for Iyer related to the media industry is to detach data
from applications while managing and consolidating data in a scalable
SAN environment.
NDTV is leveraging the Dell-Equalogic partnership using the PS
series to protect its server data on SAN using SATA and SAS boxes.
Iyer seems to have witnessed a clear RoI observing a 20% increase in
performance in hardware using these boxes within just three weeks.
"We effectively moved 800 GB of data in less than four days which
delivered the immense benefit of protecting the data with lesser user
intervention, scale data, quicker server consolidation methods and so
on," pointed out Iyer.
— N Geetha
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Then he came to the Hybrid cloud. “E-mail archiving is a great example.
I may choose to run my Exchange environment and manage it behind my own firewall
and may not want the headaches and costs involved with archiving. I will then
put messaging in my own private cloud behind the firewall and have archiving
on a public cloud service.”
Dell has Cloud Services Readiness Assessment. “If you are on UNIX systems
we advise you to migrate to x86. That’s the first step. If you decide to
do that in a private cloud capacity we will be working with you around an assessment
on virtualization, return on investment, cost associated with migration activities
etc.,” he said.
The Public cloud is more hype than reality but point solutions are attractive—SaaS,
for e.g. “What we think will happen is that these will get adopted by SMBs
first because they don’t want to make the upfront investment and they don’t
have the required IT staff,” he said.
Dell has virtualized almost 6,000 servers. “That’s one of the five
biggest virtualization implementations on the entire planet,” said Davis.
Dell is one of VMware’s largest partners. “We have more VMware installations
in India than any other company,” he said.
“We are realizing $29 million in savings as a result of migrating from
a physical environment to a virtual one,” he added.
Linux is a mature OS and a robust platform. “We have a group that does
nothing but UNIX to Linux migrations. Infrastructure apps tend to be easiest
while custom, home-grown apps are the most difficult,” he stated.
Lastly, he spoke about managed services and said that, “Dell for the last
three to four years has changed making more investments in acquisitions. 15
months ago, we purchased EqualLogic for $1.4 bn. We are investing in software
companies that allow you to manage your IT infrastructure in the cloud. 5,000
customers on a worldwide basis trust Dell to manage their IT infrastructure.
The usage model is a dollar a month per user or a dollar per month per seat
etc. It’s very flexible.”
“We will continue to invest heavily in innovation and focus on industry
standards. We power some of the world’s largest clouds. If you look for
a cloud services provider, virtualization is the first step,” concluded
Davis.
— Prashant L Rao
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