As a Dell employee, I’ve had the privilege of being on the front lines of Dell’s cloud strategy.  Until today, I have not been able to post about the exciting offerings that we’ve been brewing.

Two related components have been occupying my days.  The first is the new cloud optimized hardware and the second is the agreement to offer private clouds using Joyent’s infrastructure. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be exploring some of the implications of these technologies.  I’ve already been exploring them in previous posts.

Cloud optimized hardware grew out of lesson learned in Dell’s custom mega-volume hardware business (that’s another story!).  This hardware is built for applications and data centers that embrace scale out designs.  These customers build applications that are so fault tolerant that they can focus on power, density, and cost optimizations instead of IT hardening.  It’s a different way of looking at the data center because they see the applications and the hardware as a whole system.

To me, that system view is the soul of cloud computing.

The Dell-Joyent relationship is a departure from the expected.  As a founder of Surgient, I’m no stranger to hypervisor private clouds; however, the Joyent takes a fundamentally different approach.  Riding on top of OpenSolaris’ paravirtualization, this cloud solution virtually eliminates the overhead and complexity that seem to be the default for other virtualization solutions.  I especially like Joyent’s application architectures and their persistent vision on how to build scale-out applications from the ground up.

To me, scale should be baked into the heart of cloud applications.

So when I look at Dell’s offings, I think we’ve captured the heart and soul of true cloud computing.