Dell's Canned Datacenter Clouds allow Quick Adoption

While the argument continues over the nature of public, private, and hybrid clouds, Dell has quietly partnered with third-party vendors to offer pre-packaged solutions for specific problems. This is on top of offering pre-configured versions of their own hardware solutions targeted at specific industries.

Friday, Dell talked about the success that they have been seeing with three of their solutions, targeted at IT service providers, data warehouses, and analytics. By partnering with Greenplum for data warehouses, Aster Data  for analytics, and Joyent for IT service providers Del has been able to deliver ready-to-go cloud computing solutions for both internal customer use and for those customers to deliver cloud-based services to their clients.

These packaged solutions take a lot of the guesswork out of the decision process for Dell's customers.  If there needs fit with the offering, the customer is able to invest in a tested and proven solution that meets a very specific set of criteria, without the need to do the long term testing and evaluation that would normally precede the implementation of this class of solutions.

Taking a quick look at the customers announced today it's clear that Dell doesn't care if the intended market is the public, private or a hybrid cloud solution; by offering the canned solution that fits a specific need Dell circumvents the "which cloud is it" argument and delivers a solution that leaves it up to the customer to decide which label fits and how the solution will be used.