Cloud Computing

A Dell point of view

Whitepaper

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.

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

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 and operational 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 different ways. 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.

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 computing symbolizes 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.

If computers of the kind I have advocated become the computers of the future, then computing may someday be organized as a public 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, speaking at the MIT Centennial in 1961

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.

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 and related 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 how applications 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.

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 in a 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 cloud within. 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-

The market is clearly driving towards hybrid compositions that combine strengths based on the business drivers for the application.

site and hosted locations. Generally, on-site means that customers have chosen to self-manage and capitalize the resources that operate their cloud. Over the last decade, the majority of IT spending was directed toward this type of infrastructure. While control has significant value, moving to a hosted model provides significant financial incentives by shifting IT spend as an operational expense (OpEx) rather than capital and increases companies ability to quickly expand or contract their IT spending.

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 key terms 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

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 perspective this 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 it comes 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.

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 together with 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.

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 current landscape? 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 easy problem 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 as education, 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 deployment environment. 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.

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

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

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With the revolutionary approach 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 for failure 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 evolutionary approach 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 need to 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 strategy

How do you get started down the path from traditional IT to cloud computing? Dell has specific 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 caters to 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 time and 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 key components: 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 Director is 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, and educational 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 geared towards 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 about how Dell can help with your cloud initiatives. Current information can also be obtained by visiting our website at:

http://www.dell.com/cloud
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