Dell DCS advances technologies for more open, customer-centric cloud solutions

It’s been an exciting few months here in DCS and with Dell World just around the corner, it’s a great time to talk about some of the ground-breaking steps we’re taking alongside our customers and partners to accelerate open innovation in the IT industry in the coming months.

Today marks the introduction of the latest version of the Microsoft Open CloudServer specification to the Open Compute Project (OCP) and Dell is proud to have worked closely with Microsoft in the development of the specification.  As the leading provider of density-optimized hardware to hyperscale service providers worldwide, Dell is excited to support the growth of open cloud infrastructure and the OCP community it helped establish in 2011.  This latest specification brings new performance and flexibility to cloud architects and expands the systems management capabilities of Open CloudServer significantly.

Today’s donation further extends the commitment Dell and Microsoft are making to cloud builders following last week’s announcement of the Microsoft Cloud Platform System (CPS), aka ‘San Diego’, powered by Dell.  In each solution, Microsoft and Dell worked closely together to deliver customer-focused capabilities that balance productivity and implementation costs while reducing overall complexity.

Interoperability is also critical to cloud and related scale-out applications and Dell is working hand-in-hand with Intel and others to standardize systems management and the future of rack-level infrastructure.  At last month’s Intel Developer Forum, we stated our intention to support the cross-vendor Redfish specification our latest G5 rack-level hyperscale infrastructure.  Redfish brings the promise of truly open, scalable systems management to the datacenter and is perhaps the most comprehensive management specification introduced since IPMI arrived in 1998.  As Intel builds out its vision of the Rack Scale Architecture (RSA) future, Dell will continue to provide innovative, customer-centric solutions that push the industry forward and enable easier and more efficient datacenter management.

Exploring the limits of datacenter efficiency has been a hallmark of Dell’s enterprise business and as our customers ask us for new ways to save power and money, we continue to investigate alternative solutions to traditional datacenter challenges.  Continuing our long-standing development of low-power enterprise servers, Dell demonstrated an ultra-dense, 1U twelve-drive Ceph storage cluster concept based on a 64-bit ARM X-gene processor at ARM TechCon 2014.

The demand for open Ceph-based storage for OpenStack and related cloud operating systems is changing the economics of the datacenter and Dell is at the forefront of enabling such solutions for its scale-out customers.

While the past few weeks have seen a number of exciting changes in enterprise IT, there’s more yet to come.  The month of November will bring a host of new open, customer-focused innovations that we’ll kick off at Dell World and we hope you’ll be as excited as we have been about building them for you.

About the Author: Tracy Davis