The Register makes a very good (and pretty funny) point about Dell’s recent reinvention.  With all their recent acquisitions here in the general San Francisco Bay Area, Dell is developing a decidedly West Coast flair.

Between buying Scalent, Ocarina Networks, and KACE, all Bay Area/Silicon Valley-based companies, it looks like Dell is definitely making progress towards a new conception of data centers.

One of the most admirable things about Dell right now is devotion to an open system in which all kinds of third-party components can be used with Dell’s systems.  They also have a respect for legacy technologies which is looking pretty innovative at this point when most companies are all in favor of expending a lot of capital on brand-new equipment, which they feel will theoretically save in the long run.  Terms like "hippies" and "free love" are coming up, and with good reason.

Earlier this week Ben Linder, CEO of Scalent, offered a lot of insight into all this at a San Francisco publicity event, and talked about how Dell is letting Scalent stick to its former principles and respecting its differences in approach to the data center management software which is their focus.  Check out the full story at The Register.

This inclusive, flexible approach seems like exactly the right thing to do in some ways, and I look forward to seeing how it all plays out.  Abandoning the simplicity of more modular or containerized approaches in favor of the practicality of integration is an interesting rejection of current trends, and in years to come we’ll see how it all goes.


Elizabeth English

photo by Travis_Simon under flickr creative commons license

---

Share this with your network!