Coté

This is the private cloud in a box that Dell doesn’t call a “private cloud.” It’s converged infrastructure. Adding in Puppet is great and certainly makes it feel more cloudy.

Dell has spent a long time, with several acquistions, trying to get ActiveSystems just right. As TPM sums it up:

Active System Manager is largely based on a sophisticated set of infrastructure management tools that Dell took over and rebranded after it acquired Gale Technologies in November 2012 for an undisclosed sum. Dell had a mix of systems and cloud management tools, including those it got when it acquired Scalent and licensed from DynamicOps (which VMware bought in July 2012), for its infrastructure management.

To a limited extent, there’s all the assets in Quest and then adjacent is Enstratius.

The two questions for Dell on automation are always around Crowbar and Gale:

“We have been following Chef and Puppet in the industry for a long time,” Ganesh Padmanabhan, director of products for Dell’s converged infrastructure solutions, tells EnterpriseTech. “With Crowbar, the exercise at that time was to make a bet and see how far it goes. We are going to keep that activity alive, Crowbar is still massively important for our larger scale and Web 2.0 customers. But we are seeing more traction on the Puppet side, so this becomes a more strategic bet for us.”

And on Gale:

Going forward, new configuration and control templates for Dell machinery will be created in Puppet, and the vast trove of templates for third party gear will be available to customers using Active System Manager.

Overall, it sounds good. It does make Dell a Chef and Puppet house, which is always an architectural quandry to sort out internally.

All of these mega-vendors are going after the soup-to-nuts cloud transformation portfolio: they have to, even if it’s highly undifferentiated. Most recently, I took a stab at writing up HP’s approach and strategy (you can extract the general strategy if your pattern recognition reverse engineering skills are up to snuff), available for 451 subscribers or those who care to lead-gen themselves for a 30 day trial.