Dell Expands Cloud Computing

Dell is moving beyond the box, offering two cloud computing solutions.

Recently Dell made several announcements regarding solutions for the virtual era. It was actually a big day for the company, marking its initial journey away from the box and into the world of cloud computing and services. Apparently the new cloud-based attack will come on two fronts: Dell's Cloud Solution for web applications, and a Cloud Partner Program for existing systems.

"This web application platform as a service (PaaS) solution is designed to address the key issues around web application development and deployment: unpredictable traffic, the fear of under-provisioning and migration from development to production," the company stated in this press release regarding the Cloud Solution. "The solution will combine Dell cloud-optimized servers and services with fully-integrated Web application cloud software from Joyent, a leader in cloud computing."

Dell's Cloud Partner program will take a different route by expanding options available for customers looking to build and deploy public and private clouds. The company has called on three cloud ISV partners to help create the virtual space: Aster Data, Greenplum, and Canonical. All three will offer cloud blueprints for data analytics, self-service data warehousing, and an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud capability.

In addition to these two solutions, Dell is also extending its PowerEdge server family with the new "C" models. The C1100 is a cluster-optimized compute node server, packing high memory. The C2100 is a cloud compute platform and cloud storage server, providing high performance for data analytics. The third addition, Dell's PowerEdge C6100, is a 4-node cloud and cluster optimized shared infrastructure server.