Dell expands enterprise technology portfolio 17 June, 2009 By Chris Talbot

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The new services, configurations and products were designed to reduce costs and complexity in both virtualization and high-performance computing (HPC) environments while providing solutions for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The focus is on bringing efficiency to the hardware and extending the technology of virtualization and HPC, said Brad Anderson, senior vice president of Dell's Enterprise Product Group.

"Large enterprises, small- to medium-sized business and public sector organizations face common IT obstacles that impede their ability to efficiently assess, deploy and manage technology. From virtualization to high-performance computing clusters, customers are seeking standards-based technologies that improve efficiency while reducing costs. With Dell, organizations benefit from a powerful, efficient and affordable portfolio of server, storage and virtualization products and services that help put them on the fast track to efficiency," Anderson said.

New flexible and modular virtualization consulting services will help reduce planning time to accelerate virtualization adoption and simplify the management of virtual environments. Dell is introducing a variety of ProConsult consulting options aimed at reducing the cost to plan, manage and run them.

The first is Platform Optimization and Virtualization, which improves the effectiveness of IT infrastructures by analyzing workload requirements, reference architectures and validated solutions. According to John Joseph, vice president of storage solutions marketing at Dell, the virtualization services can dramatically reduce total cost of ownership, provision virtual machines in minutes instead of weeks and help customers build a standards-based virtual environment.

Data Center Planning and Management was designed to help customers make IT investment decisions faster based on best practices and key technology insights rather than long-term, manual consulting engagements.

Disaster Recovery helps customers plan and implement an effective and affordable disaster recovery program balancing people, processes and technology.

Data Management's purpose is to quickly diagnose problems and recommend storage solutions to eliminate unused capacity, provision storage faster and comply with internal policies and external regulations.

Lastly, Facilities Efficiency resolves space, power and cooling issues in priority order to eliminate expensive air conditioning upgrades and help reduce energy consumption.

"If we look under the simplified management portion and improved planning, so Dell ProConsult offering electronic discovery, Web-based surveys, best practices ... I think that's really critically important because Dell can introduce the servers and storage and presumably the hardware is going to be great. What software tools are they shipping with the hardware that will enable IT administrators to effectively use the hardware," said Michelle Warren, president of MW Research & Consulting.

Dell announced two new virtualization configurations with the intent of simplifying the design, procurement and deployment of virutal infrastructures. The Data Center Virtualization Configuration combines Dell PowerEdge M-series blades and EqualLogic PS6000 iSCSI storage technology with Cisco Catalyst switches, VMware vSphere 4 and Platespin Migrate from Novell to create an intelligent, automated datacenter. The Small and Medium Business Virtualization Configuration combines the PowerEdge R710, Dell PowerVault MD3000i, PowerVault DL2000 powered by Symantec for backup, and PowerConnect networking technology, with Microsoft's virtualization suite to reduce costs and simplife virtualization management.

Dell also announced additional virtualization solutions, including enhanced support for VMware vSphere 4 and Citrix Essentials for XenServer 5.0, as well as disaster recovery and application virutalization products.

In order to eliminate the management complexity of virtual infrastructure, Dell announced simplified management tools, including the Dell Virtualization Management toolkit, which offers a choice of Dell and partner management tools like Dell OpenManage and EqualLogic storage management, as well as systems management platforms like from Microsoft, Symantec and VMware, and the Dell Management Console.

The new Dell ProManage Virtual Server Remote Monitoring and Reporting was designed to help to provide improved visibility into VM performance and determine average utilization for processor, memory, network and disk at the VM level for better virtual and physical asset management.

Dell also announced the release of the EqualLogic PS4000 storage array and the PowerVault NX3000 network-attached storage (NAS) device for SMBs and remote offices. The PS4000 includes enterprise-class storage virtualization, thin provisioning and management capabilities. It was designed to integrate seamlessly into existing EqualLogic storage area networks (SANs). It was built with the idea of addressing three different design requirements -- server virtualization, consolidation, and data protection and disaster recovery.

The PowerVault NX3000 shares files across Windows and non-Windows clients and reduces duplicate files with single-instant storage (SIS) technology. It was designed with several things in mind, including greater performance, a compact design and being easy to use by SMB customers.

According to Warren, the new products and services from Dell should offer some interesting opportunities to channel partners.

Greg Davis, vice president and general manager of the Dell Global Commercial Channel Group, noted that SMB customers are currently looking for technology that is easy to get up and running, but that also allows them to do more with their limited IT resources.

"For our partners, it is vitally important that we provide products and prices that simplify the process for them ... and great return on investment quickly," Davis said.