Abstract
Standards are the mechanism by which interoperability is achieved, which leads to commoditized products, which often leads to both lower cost and more predictable outcomes when designing and deploying data center architectures. Open Source Software (OSS) is consistent with a standards-based philosophy: OSS drives convergence and incorporates the consensus of the targeted user base in a very direct fashion. For these reasons, and because of the low acquisition cost, Dell believes that OSS will not only be widely integrated (hence widely adopted), but that it will also help to influence the standards-based environment and foster its expansion. Dell promotes and seeks to leverage standards, including OSS, for these reasons. Dell envisions and promotes a world in which OSS and proprietary software not only coexist, but also are complementary. OSS is like a giant customer feedback mechanism that directly influences standards by allowing unbridled invention-in-the-large. Closed or proprietary source software typically offers a higher degree of accountability, more concrete support mechanisms, and more targeted areas of innovation while, if standards-compliant, remaining interoperable with OSS. The increasing mixture of open source and proprietary systems in the majority of today's corporate data centers attest to the validity of this model. Dell expects this coexistence to become even easier as systems management infrastructure and security standards mature and take hold. We believe the Intel(R) architecture is already the de facto standard for mixed environments, providing a nearly homogeneous pool of hardware, which can be repurposed quickly with either OSS or proprietary software - or a combination of the two - in response to changing compute demands. Not only do we see OSS as part of the deployed software mix, but we also see it as helping to define and standardize deployment infrastructures themselves. |
