Digital media expert Shel Israel and Barton George on cloud computing
By Shel Israel
Barton George is Dell’s Cloud Computing Group evangelist. As such, he serves as company ambassador to the cloud computing community. He works with customers, analysts and media, and is an active blogger and tweeter. He has had a diverse career and has experienced life in many places. Hawaiian-born, Barton attended Williams College and Harvard Business School in Massachusetts. Upon graduation, he moved to Japan to work in Sony's News Workstation Group. From there, he moved to New Jersey where he endured the challenges of marketing dental floss for Johnson & Johnson.
Next, he moved to Silicon Valley where he spent 13 years at Sun Microsystems — the last three as Sun's Open Source evangelist — where he became known and respected as an avid open source advocate and Linux® strategist. He joined Dell in Austin in 2009 to help the Cloud Group expand its capabilities.
Next, he moved to Silicon Valley where he spent 13 years at Sun Microsystems — the last three as Sun's Open Source evangelist — where he became known and respected as an avid open source advocate and Linux® strategist. He joined Dell in Austin in 2009 to help the Cloud Group expand its capabilities.
| Q: You're an open source software guy. So what are you doing at a hardware company? | |
| A: I'll have to admit when I first heard about Dell's cloud and scale-out effort, I was a bit skeptical, thinking it was going to be all about boxes. But once I learned what it had been up to and where it was going — offering integrated solutions composed of hardware, software and services — I realized this wasn't your father's Dell. I realized the huge potential and saw a real opportunity for someone like me. | |
| Q: Dell really jumped into the cloud with its Data Center Solutions (DCS) group, which custom-builds systems for some of the world's largest cloud companies. How did the whole DCS unit get started? | |
| A: It began in March 2007 as a proverbial skunk works project to take a radically different, somewhat entrepreneurial approach. Michael was very interested and asked Forrest Norrod to lead it. This cloud group intentionally set up its shop away from Dell's main campus. The group's charter was to develop processes and solutions that would meet the needs of a small, but very influential, set of hyperscale customers. Given that, there were no assumptions that we use existing Dell processes and solutions. DCS leveraged traditional Dell methods where it made sense and set up new processes and solutions when the needs of this unique customer set dictated. As a result, DCS has developed its own supply chain, engineering processes and manufacturing relationships, all of which have been key factors in its success. | |
| Q: How has that worked out so far? | |
| A: DCS is among Dell's fastest-growing workgroups. We are hiring and training talented hardware, software and consulting professionals as fast as we can. We work with 20 to 30 of the world's largest cloud providers and scale-out environments, companies such as Facebook®, Microsoft® Azure™ and Ask.com® to name a few. Unfortunately, since customers at this scale often regard their IT environment as a competitive advantage, we can't name them all. | |
| Q: Are the environments that these largest users maintain really so different from others that they warrant a special group to address them? | |
| A: There is a fundamental difference in the architecture employed in these ultra scaled-out enterprises from the architecture you would find at a medium or even large organization. In scaled-out environments, resiliency and availability, which would normally be the responsibility of the hardware, is taken care of by the software. As a result, a lot of the stuff you would normally design into the system is stripped out, and in its place, you double down on attributes such as cooling, density, TCO and power efficiency. | |
| Q: You mention cooling and data density. Are they really such a big deal? Doesn't that just amount to chump change for a big company? | |
| A: You might think they are not important, but in a scaled-out architecture, those factors get massively magnified and can devour the bottom line. A watt here or there times 100,000 servers becomes very significant. It's not just the box but also the entire data center that must be set up for maximum cooling and power efficiency. | |
| Q: If you can serve 30 of the world's largest cloud computing companies, why can't you take what you are providing them, tweak it a little and sell it to a wider audience? | |
A: In effect, that is exactly what we are doing. | |
| Q: So this is a hardware solution? | |
A: Hardware is a key component, but we are delivering complete solutions. Unlike our custom customers who write their own software, this next group needs software and services along with the hardware. An example of one of these solutions is the Dell Cloud Solution for Web applications, a turnkey private cloud solution featuring the software from our partner Joyent. | |
| Q: What’s your vision for cloud computing and the future of Dell? | |
| A: Personally, I think cloud computing will help shape the future of Dell. In fact, cloud is helping to transform what Dell is as a company. We are migrating into solutions and heavily into consulting services. Our acquisition of Perot Systems (now Dell Services) is a fundamental component of that latter move. You will hear a great deal about cloud in the short term and there will be an explosion in activity over the next 3–5 years. As we progress, however, the term 'cloud' computing will slip away. It will simply become 'computing' as the enterprise evolves into the obvious next phase of IT. | |
