Dell Hires Former STG CTO As It Launches Active System 800 Integrated Iron
October 22, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
A few months ago, I got a tip that Jai Menon, the chief technology officer for the Systems and Technology Group at IBM, had left Big Blue and was preparing to take a high-level job at Dell. People at the enterprise groups at both IBM and Dell refused to comment on it, and so did Menon when I tried to contact him over the Intertubes, and so I waited for the inevitable announcement. It came last week as Dell launched an integrated, converged system called the Active System 800. Yes, the AS 800. Dell has put together a team of networking, systems, and software experts who hail from IBM, Cisco Systems, and Hewlett-Packard plus founders and techies that have come from the myriad acquisitions that Dell has made in the past several years. In case you haven’t figured it out, all of the major PC players had already figured out that the “personal computer” of choice was rapidly becoming a tablet and a smartphone thanks to Apple, and they have been scrambling to build up their systems businesses with acquisitions of more sophisticated systems, disk arrays, networking, and add-on software. IBM might be able to be smug about selling off its PC business years ago, but it certainly cannot rest on its laurels in the systems area. It has had to react, too, as all other system makers have, to the threat made nearly four years ago by the entry of Cisco into the server racket with converged servers and switching with its “California” family of UCS blade and rack servers and Nexus switches. IBM, Dell, HP, and anyone can believe whatever they want and say whatever they want, but they all have had to react to the UCS iron and the threat that Cisco represents in the data center. Dell has taken a bunch of different tacks in trying to get an integrated system out the door, with the prior iteration being a mix of rack or blade servers called vStarts, tuned up to support a particular number of virtual machines running either VMware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors and add-on system, hypervisor, and cloud management tools.
The Active System family of machines launched last week by Dell at an event in San Francisco was a coming out party of sorts for Menon as he takes over as chief technology officer for Dell’s Enterprise Business Group, which covers servers, storage, switches, and systems software, much as Menon did for Big Blue for many years. Menon was joined at the launch by Don Ferguson, a software hotshot at IBM who was responsible for creating the WebSphere product line and eventually became CTO for Software Group. Ferguson followed former IBMer John Swainson when the latter became CEO at CA Technologies (which should just call itself Computer Associates and stop being silly) and has followed Swainson again as he was put in charge of Dell’s Software Group earlier this year. David Johnson, who handled acquisitions strategy for IBM, now does the same thing for Dell. There’s nothing earthshattering about the Active System family–yet. But what Menon and Ferguson mapped out on a whiteboard for about 15 minutes were all of the problems facing IT departments in a cloudy era and how they would possibly go about solving the issues. This was not about bending bits of metal around Intel and Advanced Micro Devices processors and aggressively managing the supply chain, which is what allowed Dell to become the $62 billion IT player it is. What is important is that Dell has pulled together a collection of technologies–most of them acquired–and people–mostly from the outside–that can work together and build integrated systems. The company is committed to supporting both Windows and Linux operating systems on all of its machines, and is using its own VIS Creator (a variant of the DynamicOps cloud provisioning and self-service code now controlled by VMware) and Microsoft Systems Center 2012 to build Windows-based clouds on the Active System machines, and it will no doubt use OpenStack to make Linux-based clouds. Back in June 2011, the company bought RNA Networks, a maker of special caching and clustering software that allows multiple server nodes or, in this case, their integrated flash arrays, to be pooled as a single giant cache accessible by all nodes in a cluster and therefore able to be snapshotted and backed up as a single storage device. (In a way, it is similar to DB2 multisystem clustering software IBM has for IBM i databases, but works down at the hardware level.) RNA cache clustering is one of the secret sauce ingredients of the Active System machines, although Dell said last week that it will not ship it until next year. Another key component of the Active System machine, called the I/O Aggregator, is shipping, and it is designed to aggregate I/O coming out of blades and pipe it up in aggregated form up to a top of rack switch. The idea is that you want to make multiple blade server enclosures hang off of one or two switches in a rack and not be limited to the fairly skinny switches that slide into the back of blade servers. By passing through I/O for server-to-server and server-to-storage links up to the top of rack switches, you flatten the network and reduce the number of hops it takes to get from one node to another in a set of racks. In modern cloudy applications, particularly with live migration of virtual machines, you get a lot of node-to-node traffic and much less of the node-to-outside world traffic. The typical Web service you are using might be comprised of a dozen interconnected applications that run on different parts of the cloudy infrastructure.
Eventually, Dell will have a whole family of Active System machines, presumably with either rack or blade configurations and even possibly in super-dense hybrid architectures like Dell’s Data Center Solutions unit builds for hyperscale cloud operators. For the moment, the initial Active System 800 machine is based on Dell’s M1000e chassis, which uses a mix of blades that come in full, half, and quarter heights and deliver 8, 16, or 32 nodes in a 10U rack chassis. You can put in six switches or I/O Aggregators, and the latter can either be used to pump up the bandwidth coming off the blades (with multiple 10 Gigabit Ethernet links coming into the midplane where the servers slot in and off the midplane into the aggregator) or to provide up to three distinct network fabrics inside the chassis. The machine comes with up to two M1000e enclosures and you buy blades in blocks of eight. Any blade that has mezzanine cards to plug into 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks can be used, so that’s the PowerEdge 12G M420, M620, and M820 nodes, which are two-socket machines that take up a quarter, a half, or a full slot in the M1000e chassis for a maximum of 32, 16, or eight per chassis, respectively. The M620 nodes are the default, with 128GB of memory. The base box comes with two EqualLogic disk arrays, expandable to eight units, and the whole shebang scales up to two racks and as many as 64 processor nodes. Dell also slaps in two 48-port 10GE switches, the Force10 S4810, plus a slower Force10 S55 switch to link into the nodes for management. Dell puts in redundant Power R620 rack servers to run its Active System Manager, a beefed up version of the tools it created to plug into VMware’s vCenter management console that can now stand on their own and are packed up to run inside of an ESXi virtual machine. A base configuration comes with freebie ESXi hypervisors on each node and a trial version of vCenter on the management nodes, plus Active System Manager. A base machine with one chassis, one switch, eight nodes, two disk arrays, and a rack with power distribution units runs $259,000. It is not quite an Application System/400, but it is a start. RELATED STORIES Big Blue Pits PureData Appliance Against Ellison’s Exadata IBM Rounds Out Flex Systems With Xeon E5 Iron IBM Beats Out Cisco For Modular Server Deal A Closer Look At The Flex System Iron IBM Launches Hybrid, Flexible Systems Into The Data Center Oracle Has Built A Modern, Cloudy AS/400 Oracle Takes The Midrange Fight To IBM Oracle Gets Systems Design, and Starts Proving It Microsoft, HP Talk Up Frontline Integrated Systems Maybe They Should Have Called Them iBlocks? Cisco’s California Dream: One Vendor to Supply It All
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