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Dell Dumps Its Public Cloud Offerings
itwbennett writes "Last week, Dell said that it would be 'refining' its OpenStack plans. Now we know that 'refining' means 'backing away from'. Although the company wouldn't answer direct questions on the subject, a press release spells it out like this: 'Sales of Dell's current in-house multi-tenant public cloud IaaS will be discontinued in the U.S. in favor of best-in-class partner offerings.' Interestingly, none of Dell's initial partners, including Joyent, ScaleMatrix and ZeroLag, have platforms built on OpenStack."
So, does this mean the "cloud" doesn't rain money on the sevice providers?
Dell, along with most other computer companies, jumped on the cloud bandwagon long before anyone had an idea about what they were doing - let alone had a business model.
This is what a two billion dollar cash infusion buys? They are the new Nokia apparently.
Dell was good at designing, and assembling computers, and selling them direct to customers for low cost. Unfortunately, Intel gave away reference designs, Foxconn and Walmart were better at assembling and selling computers to the American Public. Sorry Dell, but you were out competed.
Someone overheard part of the conversation which went something like "it turns out that people aren't as dumb as we though they were".
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Anybody else misread that as "Pubic Cloud"?
Hmmm, Dell provides a lot of hardware to Rackspace. Rackspace has an OpenStack implementation offering.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
Building and maintaining a public cloud offering is not cheap, nor is it easy. I was laid off from my last job due to the shortsightedness of the management staff. When I started asking for licensing and support from the vendors due to unforeseen issues, as well as additional equipment due to the growth rate, the management staff realized they couldn't do it as cheaply as they wanted. I have experience building an IaaS product, and that experience tells me to just let someone else deal with it that already has the issues figured out. Linode and Rackspace are great examples. In addition, if one wants to offer a custom portal for their clients, then I suggest you write an interface that uses your vendor's API and call it a day. 'nuff said.
Just kidding.. Dell charge way too much for their cloud service and can't deliver, it's no surprise that they're cutting back now...
Could it be that Dell discovered the hard way that their servers are, in-fact, too expensive? Companies like Dell and HP are seeing declining server sales due to projects like OpenCompute that are bypassing 1st tier vendors and going straight to ODMs for simpler, cheaper servers. Some of the companies buying these cheap servers include cloud service providers like Amazon.
Obviously Dell can't do that with their own in-house offerings, so perhaps they just couldn't compete with vendors running on cheaper servers.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Dude, you're getting an even better cloud than the one we were talking about. Somebody else's!
While I recognize that Dell's failure in the industry doesn't indict Openstack, it's really not that good.
Every well known provider either doesn't use it, or at best uses it in a token fashion to appear 'open'. The reason is pretty straightforward, it's functional scope is sufficiently limited that each vendor is just as well off writing their own private solution. It actually takes less work to charge forward with your own implementation than go through the hoops of coordinating with a wider community comprised of people with goals and strategies that may directly oppose each other in this sort of thing.
We've seen repeated changes in this space with the 'promise' of building a less segmented public cloud market. OVF, Eucalytpus, a few DMTF attempts, all promising to deliver a market that is somehow magically standardized, none of them coming to fruition, but each time causing huge chunks of the market to fall over themselves in what seems to be an attempt to seem 'hip' and progressive.
So they've finally realized that OpenStack is just a death-knell for the IaaS industry. It commoditizes it and enables a race to the bottom, like it earlier happened with web hosting and later with individual VPS hosting. A couple of years from now and we're going to be swamped by small companies offering OpenStack-based clouds.
And so instead of trying to capitalize on their own server production unit and compete on price, Dell's going to try and differentiate themselves using some half-assed proprietary offerings. And since every company trusts Dell enough to build their critical infrastructure on Dell's proprietary systems then it certainly is going to be a smash hit in the industry. Not.
I was working with a company who signed a contract with dell to have people start implementing "private clouds" on the Microsoft platform. I think they realized that most organization need more control over their data due to regulations and solutions like this may not meet those needs.