A target acquisition for Dell?

The title says it all.

The (re)birth of the fourth stack vendor

....Depending on how do you define a stack vendor you might want to say Dell is fighting to become the fifth one ;-)

Dell has been aggressive in their acquisitions and hirings in the last 18 months.

They are positioning themselves as the makers of the "plumbing" of distributed computing, their effort to integrate smart building boxes the likes of RNA is beginning to pay back.

It seems they believe that simpler is better and sells faster and,albeit a bit dull, Dell is a "no-BS" company that is striving to adapt to a changing market. If their performance has not been stellar in the last quarters, I expect this to change because of their strategic positioning.

IMHO Enterprise IT in the next 5 years will be an game of scale, Dell might be well positioned as the alternative to HP for x86 consolidated architectures.

Where they might have some hiccups is in the "re-factoring" of their sales-force and a related sales approach that is typical of the box-mover. In some countries (like where I live) Dell does not speaks to the CIO or even the CTO because they never positioned themselves as value added providers.

But I know, for sure, they are working hard to change their brand perception and whith much more impetus than one might imagine.

Render unto Caesar…

There is a work of a group of European (yes, European... I know it's incredible) that might predate (2009) Mr. Moglen "crusade", it promises to cost less than 29 quids and is even better focused:

http://www.peerson.net/papers/oliver_da.pdf

and, more general:

http://www.peerson.net/publications.shtml

For what I perused in the Freedom Box website, no reference to this project.

The two ideas are suspiciously very similar, swap the word "router" for "box" and you get the same kind of animal.

Is this a blatant case of stealing ideas and not crediting it? If this is the case it's a direct punch to the very principles of Open Source.

Pigs and lipsticks

A cloud that relies on shared storage it's not Cloud.

1.000 nodes is a respectable figure (for not-CSPs), however I would like to see the price of the supporting infrastructure to reach that.

Cloud is synonim of near-linear scalability at low price (the latter trending to linearly decrease), I don't see this happening on shared storage architectures.

Heck, even VMWare admits they are looking for alternatives as distributed storage.

Nimbula, Eucalyptus and (on the application side) Hadoop: those are examples, to my knowledge, of scalable "shared-nothing" architectures for the Cloud, moreover, they all implement some sort of data/process vicinity.

Rebranding massive deployment tools as Cloud architectures seems to be the trend of the last months...

Where is a "fake cloud" icon?

Not Mac-minis

A Hadoop cluster as the one needed to manage sheer volumes iAds mightgenerate spans surely multiple racks.

You better have serious networking and decent throughput (net to disk and viceversa) to pump decent amount of splits and spills around your nodes. multiple disks are used natively by the Shuffler in Hadop to spread local I/O on each node.

Definitively this might rule the Minis out :)

Regarding OSX and Hadoop:

The story of "bugs" might affecting OSX and not Linux...pretty weak argument.

Hadoop is mostly Java-based except a10% code needed for stuff like encryption, compression and streams. Installing from source needs some packages but the same might apply as soon as you exit from the most supported Linux distros.

Personal experience is a 15 nodes cluster on OSX, not the biggest of this world, but it works and is even provisioned by Puppet. We noticed, however, that OSX native filesystem is sometimes quirky regarding performances and their NFS implementation needs some reworking.

Biggest advantage of. OSX, at least for my customer, was that nodes can be used as workstations when not crunching logs at night!

Games consoles always did this

Sorry to remind me the obvious but...

Isn't Nintendo using a similar "curated" model to select their games?

At some point it has been saving Nintendo from oblivion thanks to the most "puritan" choice of games of the bunch.

Programmers were guaranteed a marketplace and an educated public, parents and snotty children got cherry-colored games and no explicit violence. Everybody was happy until the iPod came to spoil the party.

I know: the one is a game console, the other is a general purpose system but, fact is, public needs less and less general purpose systems, it must just work...

For me is not gonna work however: already not having Java pre-installed is enough to let me think twice before I purchase a Mac again.

But, after all, I am an old crusty dog, statistically irrelevant.

PFFF...

...I can't disagree with Mr. Gill more.

Modern data-centers use elastic computing and dynamic machine provisioning already, either on premise or on the public cloud. The simulation Mr. Gill is proposing is dense nonsense.

Of course this is about bashing AWS IaaS approach and promoting Google PaaS offering.

How much of one's reputation can be thrown to pigs and dogs to support marketing strategy?

No, I don't want to know, actually...

Paris because she has a reputation.

It's just the first part out of four,,

This is what I read on Wiley's website: "Sign up today to receive the first chapter in a 4-part series from ‘Introduction to bada: "

It's not clear if the following three chapters will be offered for free as well.

Anyway, regarding Samsung relevancy: don't forget that we live on the "other half" of this planet. If Samsung is strong worldwide, it's even stronger in Asia and they have plans:

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-06-21/samsung-aims-to-double-its-smartphone-market-share-update1-.html

Don't underestimate them.

Azure is inter-op!!

I do not agree with comments.

Azure introduces a level of abstraction and has a preferred environment (.Net) that exploits its fiull capabilities, that's fine and it does not differ from any other Cloud/PaaS vendor (look at Goolge, Gigaspace, SalesForce, IBM)

However Azure is much more open to foreign technologies that one might know.. There is a lot of FUD around Azure and this is because is a truly innovating tool.

Examples?

- We run Lucene and Java on Azure and use their Message Bus to distribute content on premise.

- A friend of mine is organizing a conference today, in Belgium, at Microsoft BE on PHP on Azure.

So?..I am not aware of Microsoft having a product based on PHP or Java, I have to assume that Azure is open thus.

And Azure is solid. To date it performed very well albeit in Beta.

Hey, I am not an MS fan-boy, not at all, but we need to give credit where credit is due.

Stagnation is not that bad, but it won't come anyway..

After all, during the 70s, many revolutionary things have been conceived (think Unix, VMS, Relational DBs).

However the economics today is something else. In the 70s we weren't so dependent from innovation in our everyday life (e.g. Web, Mobile, Geo-services, Augmented reality). Nowadays IT is becoming a mix of business and consumer offerings, the line between the twos is even becoming fuzzier.

Oracle goes proprietary? It always did. I just hope that with SUN they get some decent system integrator because every solution they integrate in their DB has nowhere the quality and stability of the DB itself...

It's friday. My recipe is to have a pint with my best friend and try to avoid speaking of IT for the whole week-end.

Sounds an IDA storage to me

It might be an <Pedantic IT architect> IDA: Information Dispersal Algorithms. </Pedantic IT architect>

Worth to mention that there is a company called B-Virtual that successfully implemented this smart stuff long time ago and it sells it, among others, to Cloud providers.

Historical perspective

Sorry but as a long-time Apple fan(boy-no-more) I must comment on the historical perspective of a sentence in this article.

You mention:

"as director of education marketing and sales between 1981 and 1984, he ran Apple's University Consortium program, putting Macs into the hands of students and teaching staff. This solidified the Mac's presence in learning."

Nice.. But the mac has been launched in January1984 being hardly available to mass-market for the first three months. Mr. Lewin (which I profoundly respect for his work) might not have been very influential during such a brief time lapse.

At the time the Apple II was very strong in the traditional educational market (up to high schools); the Mac has been promoted upwards, the target being University and research. Nonetheless resistance has been high in the beginning due to the very limited memory the Mac offered. My perception is that it wasn't until the "Fat Mac" was available that the educational market found the platform of any use.

Whatever. .Net is today Microsoft's best weapon. Redmond (or should I say: Mountain View) is and will be relevant because it offers a continuous development model that starts from the desktop, passes through the Cloud and lands to mobile (some work to be done there but eventually they will deliver).

Gabriele

MIcroprofessor I anyone?

Seems to me that Acer is stealing the news and is becoming relevant in geek-space: Servers, storage, Netbooks, Google.... Enough to raise brand awareness to cult.

Just to tell World + Dog how trendy I am: yesterday I retrieved one of the smallest pieces of my collection from the archives: a Microprofessor I !!!

Did you know that the Microprofessor I is still manufactured (I seem to remember that a British firm is responsible to drag this heavy heritage ).. If this still holds true, it makes the little Microprofessor the longest selling (and only left) microcomputer on this planet!!

Sun/Oracle is not limited on Containers

There is a thing called QLayer laying around in the assets of SUN

@ C

"the stink was/is getting soo bad, that M$ began trying to cover it up with the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 RC Refresh, which provides a thicker chrome plating for the biggest turd ever dropped anywhere period."

Ask permission to use it as a quote for my (private) email... Your are poetry man!

G B

Paris because it's far more interesting than a SP.