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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."
This is what a two billion dollar cash infusion buys? They are the new Nokia apparently.
Someone overheard part of the conversation which went something like "it turns out that people aren't as dumb as we though they were".
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Anybody else misread that as "Pubic Cloud"?
Hmmm, Dell provides a lot of hardware to Rackspace. Rackspace has an OpenStack implementation offering.
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Dell was good when they were charging IBM prices for PC's. They were innovators to some extent. I had a few early Dell machines and they were the best specs you could buy, back in the 1980's. As soon as they started competing on price, I imagine they switched to bargain basement suppliers. Now everyone knows that to own a Dell is to have to buy a new machine the very second the warranty expires if not sooner, AND having to deal with perhaps the worst support and service in the industry. But Michael Dell made his money long ago, I'm sure he's not too worried either way. It's the shareholders' problem now.
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Intel has been giving away reference designs for 20 years.
Most Dell hardware is just generic PC hardware, bought in bulk, with 'Dell' silk screened on it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You're describing a past which never happened; e.g. the entire point of DELL's initial business model was to compete on PRICE by marketing computers directly. By not having the overhead of a physical store, they managed to undercut other vendors, with more "traditional" sales approaches, in the fledgling PC clone market of the mid 80s. Then in the 90s they went one step ahead, and they tried to do as much "just in time" distribution as they could, in order to have as little inventory as possible (shipping directly from factory to consumer, thus reducing steps in the distribution chain).
The main reason why DELL's had great quality, initially, was to make sure people got confident in buying PCs from a vendor without a mortar and brick store nearby that could provide technical service.
this is odd. given the Dell model was a huge cash cow for them.
There are plenty of people making money offering cloud provisioning/services. This is more along the lines of: Dell accepted 2 billion dollars of cash infusion from Microsoft. Dumping open stack and not building ChromeOS or linux boxes is part of the agreement terms I suppose. Open stack has been fairly successful and the vendors who seem to be dropping support for it are to entertain ways of making more money in licensing.
this is odd. given the Dell model was a huge cash cow for them.
you know what's an EVEN bigger cash cow? selling the service - the cloud service - at a premium and actually buying the service from whoever happens to be selling it cheapest that week.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
but they lose the future profits....
I think you are confusing Compaq and Dell. Compaq used to sell insanely expensive and over-engineered PCs. I seem to remember my company paying $30k for a desktop PC from Compaq in the early '90s.
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Actually they're still the #3 maker of PCs so I wouldn't be so quick to write their obit. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_computer_vendors
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.
A past that never happened? I remember DELL on the back cover of PC and Byte Magazines. And I remember the day of the $5000 Dell computer. Dell never competed on price - at least not at the beginning. The "cheap computers" were to be had from CompUSA, "Fast Data", and other dealers, for a good $2000 or more less than a Dell machine.
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Not CompUSA... some other direct marketer with Comp in their name. I had a 33MHz 386 from them but I can't remember the brand name anymore. Too damned old.
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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.
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Compaq had very good WORKSTATIONS and SERVERS, but their PCs have always been cheap. I distinctly recall their later 90's PCs, which were non-standard over-sized motherboards, with all (cheap junk) components integrated onto them. They were right along side companies like Packard Bell in the race to the bottom.
Their workstations and servers, however, were always very nice. They used large fans, with plastic ducting, multiple thermal zones, etc, decades ago. They got the benefit of all that DEC engineering expertise and experience when they bought up the remnants of the company.
The same should be said of HP as well. Their desktop PCs were junk, but their workstations were heavily over-engineered and well-designed. I remember late 90's ~200MHz HP Workstations with numerous slots for memory, and a riser card that gave 6 PCI slots, as well as 2 ISA slots, which kept those PCs expandable and relevant far after their expected shelf life. Little touches like only two levers to pull to completely remove the case made them a pleasure to work with, as well.
And to Compaq and HP's credit, when HP bough the company, they dropped their own Netserver line, and rebranded the Compaq Proliant as the HP Proliant server, and that has now become the best selling x86 server brand out there, so they did something right. Though I'm still fairly annoyed at the licensing, limitations and clumsy proprietary tools to interface with their iLo out-of-band management.
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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.
Using Dell and quality in the same sentence, hell - post at all, invalidates your entire argument. Go back to answer Dell Help Desk calls...your numbers are dropping. Tell them to rebuild their pc again to solve their printer problem...
You just invalidated your own argument by including the offending words in the same sentence.
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.
Nope. CompuAdd. I remember now. Far cheaper than Dell, and much nicer machines. Hell even Gateway was cheaper than Dell.
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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.