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Dell Releases Ubuntu-Powered Cloud Servers
angry tapir writes "Dell has released two servers for the US market that have been customized to run Ubuntu-based cloud services. The company has outfitted its PowerEdge C2100 and C6100 servers with Canonical's Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), an implementation of the Eucalyptus private cloud software that runs on the Ubuntu Server Edition operating system."
Dell blah blah blah Ubuntu blah blah blah cloud blah blah blah enterprise blah blah blah three letter acronym blah blah blah server edition blah blah blah
Linux is a kernel. GNU/Linux is the operating system. GN/Ubuntu is a LiGNUx operating system.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
...they mean they pre-loaded Ubuntu UEC on them, wow!
We purchased 16 C2100s in August. If you like being a Dell beta tester, have at it. The LSI RAID controllers they have in these things are, for a lack of a better word, complete crap. Technically, it's probably the drivers ... but until they have a working driver for linux that doesn't lose its mind and reset the card randomly (thus making your volumes disappear for a minute or two), I suggest staying away. Far away.
(Posting anonymously for obvious reasons)
The UEC combination has gotten decent ratings if you want to put your anti-Canonical prejudices aside. Dell hardware ain't all that bad these days.... the combo is a damn sight cheaper than buying a fat HP box with VMware on it..... and you get to reuse some of your code on AWS.
Yes, there are clean, virginal, can-wear-white-at-the-wedding implementations, too. This one uses kvm, if memory serves, and beats threading the whole thing together yourself.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
The idea that Dell would push Linux in the server space is pretty old news really.
Contrary to popular Lemming opinion, Microsoft doesn't have the stranglehold in the server market that it has on desktops.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Why buy Linux from a traditionally Windows-only integrator with little Linux experience? There's plenty of very skilled Linux hardware integrators out there. I'm a shill for my favorite, Silicon Mechanics.
If you were seriously in the enterprise you'd know that the added cost of a HP over a Dell is well justified. When you need to keep things running on this level there is no time to pinch pennies.
HP may be the fair to midrange PC on the Best Buy shelf but in the enterprise it kicks the crap out of anyone else. This includes their business desktops.
Never mind. The downtime from having multiple, random nodes in the cloud burn out at regular intervals isn't worth it.
Call me when Canonical gets a real company to back this setup.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Wow... this just seriously went way over your head if you are suggesting "ownCloud" as a superior replacement for UEC. I read the description for "ownCloud" and it's some kind of central file storage/sharing software. Not even the same type of product as UEC/Eucalyptus.
The difference :
- You would use ownCloud to share the latest Justin Bieber mp3s with your peeps.
- You would use UEC to build out a corporate cloud computing solution comparable/compatible with Amazon EC2 that you would then use to make bags full of money with which to buy a bigger yacht.
Their business laptops suck ass. Getting them to support them is even worse.
" People has better futures when staying away from Canonicals products."
And finishing high school helps too.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
One of the selling points of the cloud is the ability to spin up new server instances whenever they're needed. So why then would anyone need to buy a bunch of approximately equivalent servers for local development/testing/staging when all they have to do is set up a new environment in the cloud? Seems like a product designed for people who fundamentally misunderstand the whole paradigm.
Windows NT 3.1 came out in 1993, it even had an explicit Advanced Server edition. Care to explain that less than a decade comment.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Ya, right. Try to be far from it. Panda Cloud Antivirus Download Free.
No, that's the Apple tradition.
The open-source tradition is: "If it's not there, WriteItYourself(TM)".
They can't even figure out how to implement an "edit your post" feature.
Yes they can, they choose not to. Read the FAQ. Slashdot doesn't want a memory hole feature, it wants people to be able to reply to posts without worrying that the contents of the post that they replied to will change by the time people read it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Depends whose definition of operating system you are using. The GNU guys use a very wide definition including things like the compiler, shell, command line utils etc but that is far from the only definition.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
FTA: "Organizations could use the servers to test the applications locally before uploading them to Amazon's paid service. The servers have a preconfigured testing and development environment. Eucalyptus duplicates the AWS APIs (application programming interfaces)." At first, I was like, They're just selling the PowerEdge server + cloud buzzword. However, a local Dev and QA environment for AWS is nice, especially if its already configured to behaving like AWS. One problem with running stuff on AWS is troubleshooting and reproducing performance problems.
One of the selling points of the cloud is the ability to spin up new server instances whenever they're needed. So why then would anyone need to buy a bunch of approximately equivalent servers for local development/testing/staging when all they have to do is set up a new environment in the cloud? Seems like a product designed for people who fundamentally misunderstand the whole paradigm.
Maybe you don't understand how the paradigm is actually concretely implemented. Servers remotely hosted in the cloud aren't magic, somewhere, there is an actual data center, with actual servers, running software that provides the "cloud" features.
Some enterprises with many functions want to have the benefits of the cloud (e.g., dynamic provisioning of resources among the various applications the enterprise is running), but prefer in-house hosting.
Some operations, additionally, want to actually host cloud services for their clients.
Either of these operations need to have actual servers in-house, running software that provides the "cloud" features.
This is the market for local cloud servers.
Uh I don't think the open source version of Eucalyptus is proprietary...and it runs on other distros.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
When I was installing plain-jane Ubuntu over the crapware-ridden default Ubuntu install on my sister's Dell netbook a few years back, I noticed that there was a Dell Dock bar for it.
No OS is safe from Dell Dock.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Micron a well respected name? Dell, at the time, had a better less expensive product that was supported by the best tech support in the business. Times have changed however.
Microsoft has been embracing Linux for over a decade now as well - They're obviously open-source friendly and showing their worth as a team player http://www.mslinux.org/
Non sequitur. The argument that Dell being or not being a Linux-integrator (or a Windows-only integrator) is logically independent of MS position (and ulterior motives, whichever they might be) with respect to Linux and/or open source.
In fact, the truth or falsehood of one company X using and providing services based technologies Y is based solely on one yes/no question and nothing else: does company X provides services based on Y? Their position, promotions and motivations (ideological or economical) are of no consequence to true/false value of that question.
Besides, the original question and statement centered about whether Dell had experience doing integration with Linux, not about its allegiance to open source (and the former does not depend on the later independently of what the FOSS chickenhawks would like to sing). If that had been the topic under discussion, then maybe your post might have had some logic. But it wasn't.
Maybe you don't get the point of cloud computing. It's not new technology that allows you to do things never done before. It's cheap technology that allows you to do what you can already do, but cheaper, and with the ability to grow cheaply. Even the most expensive hardware can fail, so if you really need uptime, you buy two (at least) of anything and configure failover and load balancing, etc. "Cloud" computing is simply the idea of doing this at a large scale so you can bring more equipment online and move things around quickly, easily and cheaply. The real question is not whether or not nodes fail, but whether or not nodes are cheap enough that you've got plenty of extras on hand so you don't have to much care when they do. (And, of course, whether or not the cloud platform makes the failover setup quick and easy and reliable, but that's UEC's problem, not Dell's).
Of course, I've never though of Dell's as particularly cheap (though cheaper than IBM and Sun). But for the record, I work with hundreds of dell server and workstation machines running Debian and Red Had they mostly work just fine, LSI raid and all.
great! more power to them
Remind me the next time I neglect to put a gigantic [FoghornLeghorn]That's a joke son...[/FoghornLeghorn] humor tag in there.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Like the other guy said: Microsoft has been trying to dominate the market for a long time. In the mid-90s they were touting NT as some sort of Unix killer.
Although strangely enough, commercial Unix manages to linger on. Microsoft and even Linux hasn't been able to completely kill it off.
Quite often, large companies have problems that are too big to be solved on Windows.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.