Dell is asserting that cloud computing is raising the danger of vendor lock-in, which the IT industry has been successfully trying to reduce, by "shoehorning" proprietary technology into private clouds.

Well, nothing has really changed: buyer beware still rules the day!

The whole point of virtualization - the core enabler of cloud computing - is to separate hardware architecture from implementation.  Yet there are many cloud solutions that are proprietary.  And it's not limited to private clouds: Amazon, GoGrid, OpSource and others have "innovations" like hardware firewalls, proprietary hypervisors, and unique storage architectures that lock applications into their clouds.   The solution is to go back to basics: stick with hardware that supports standards (like NFS), use a an off-the-shelf hypervisor (paid or free), and implement architectural elements that used to require dedicated hardware (like firewalls and load balancers) with software (paid or free.)  Then, you can replace the underlying hardware (in the case of private clouds) OR cloud provider and keep running.   This isn't rocket science: you do have to swear off the goodies that any single cloud vendor touts as a you-can't-do-without requirement... but it also sets you free of lock-in.

At ENKI we have tried to avoid proprietary technologies that impact our customers' implementations.  Yes, we have branded firewalls and we use Infiniband,  the new wave in datacenter interconnect, as well as other non-standard technologies.  But from our customers' perspective, they are not visible or do not put requirements onto their deployments.   We've avoided exposing our hardware firewalls to our customers since that dependence would prevent moving to another cloud.  We've hidden Infiniband and our SSD-backed storage behind industry-standard NFS.   And so on.   And we always use standard hypervisors (VMWare and soon KVM) since we ourselves learned the hard way that applications stuck in a proprietary hypervisor (like our older cloud technology, Applogic, which has a custom version of Xen) are difficult to support or move around.   

As a result, our customers - for our public or our private cloud services - know that they can easily change providers, hardware architectures, geographies as their business requires, while still enjoying the superior performance and service that ENKI offers.