To help customers quickly capitalise on the efficiencies of the Virtual Era, Dell has introduced new capabilities and services for its Virtual Integrated System (VIS) architecture.
Dell recognises businesses have made significant technology purchases and its approach to converged architectures allows them to preserve and fully leverage their existing data centre infrastructure without creating technology silos or undertaking a rip-and-replace strategy.
"IDC's research shows that organisations are making evolutionary moves to the cloud, maintaining their existing infrastructure while developing new services in private and public clouds. European organisations, many of which are managing complex infrastructures across multiple countries, need technology which can easily integrate into their environment,” said Chris Ingle, Associate Vice-President, Consulting, SIS Group, IDC. “Dell's Virtual Integrated Systems architecture aims to give that evolutionary integration, preserving existing investment in technology while extending the customer's capability."
The Dell VIS architecture and services help customers transition new and existing technologies to an open, cloud-like model that dynamically provisions application workloads and unifies heterogeneous compute, storage and networking assets into a common pool of resources. As a result it's now possible for customers to lower the costs associated with managing IT, improve the flexibility needed to respond to changing business needs, and more efficiently deploy and move application workloads across physical and virtual resources.
Dell's Virtual Integrated System architecture reinforces the company's long-standing design principles of delivering solutions that are Open, Capable and Affordable. With VIS, companies can dynamically scale their environment up or down to match the variability of workloads.
Furthermore, unlike some solutions in this space, the VIS architecture is designed to integrate into a customer's broader systems management strategy and investments. By working tightly with partners like Microsoft, VMware, Citrix and BMC, VIS can deliver better utilisation of current investments and the ability to standardise and leverage existing IT processes and workflows to improve control and consistency.
Dell VIS architecture components
The VIS architecture is comprised of modular components that integrate with customers' existing IT environments. This gives customers greater choice and the ability to deploy best-of-breed solutions. The Dell VIS architecture consists of three of key components, including:
* Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager - Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager (AIM) simplifies data centre management by enabling a single administrator to allocate server, storage and network resources against application workloads. The solution can bring together heterogeneous hardware offerings and leading virtualisation hypervisors to create virtual pools of resources that are easy to manage. AIM abstracts the hardware and virtualisation layers from the data centre so that customers can focus on allocating a single pool of resources instead of managing various technologies.
* Dell VIS Self-Service Creator - Dell's VIS Self-Service Creator can shorten the time it takes to deploy new business applications by standardising and automating the way applications are deployed. The component has a Web-based portal that enables authorised users to select, deploy and manage a customised catalogue of IT applications and resources, reducing the time it takes to deploy a workload to just minutes. The VIS Self-Service Creator can increase IT control while accelerating IT processes, adding up to savings in time and resources. All this is done seamlessly with the ability to orchestrate these services across multi-vendor hardware and software solutions.
* Dell VIS Director - Dell VIS Director is the IT operations hub for the virtual environment, giving customers a comprehensive view of virtual dependencies and enabling customers to quickly identify issues within the virtual environment. The module includes advanced reporting, what-if and trend analysis, capacity and utilisation reporting and cost allocation and charge-back solutions, giving IT operators a greater level of visibility into their IT environment and better information upon which to take action. With VIS Director, enterprises can efficiently manage their current environment and plan for the future more effectively.
Dell services
Dell offers a range of services capabilities to help customers to assess, design and implement the Dell VIS architecture components into new or existing IT environments. These services and engagements work with organisations to review their IT strategy and challenges alongside Dell's point of view on virtualisation technologies.
Specific services include:
* Dell Consulting Services - These engagements address key technology and business challenges such as self-service provisioning and automation of operational tasks. Further, customers can use Dell's Technology Introductions to explore use cases as a proof of concept to make informed deployment decisions. Dell Accelerators can speed up time to value by combining a readiness assessment with limited design and implementation with predefined scope and limited integration points. Once established, Dell's Design and Implementation services include a full production roll out of the Dell VIS components.
* Dell ProSupport Services - Dell ProSupport Services provide software-specific expertise combined with Dell's extensive support infrastructure to help customers quickly reach business goals. Dell ProSupport capabilities have been expanded to include comprehensive support for the Dell VIS components that spans a customer's entire IT environment. Features like basic-to-advanced software troubleshooting, and software subscriptions with remote deployment assistance of patches and updates help customers confidently support their heterogeneous infrastructure.
Availability:
Dell's architecture is unique in that unlike the one-size-fits-all approach of some of the competition, Dell's Virtual Integrated System offers customers the flexibility to deploy the components most needed for their specific needs. VIS architecture components can be purchased individually and do not require customers to make separate hardware purchases. This flexibility helps customers move toward a more cloud-like model on their own timeline and with existing hardware.
Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager and Dell VIS Self-Service Creator are available today and Dell VIS Director will be available in the coming quarters.
Quotes:
”Dell's VIS architecture provides us with a very flexible and dynamic data centre solution that spans physical and virtual resources, helping increase our productivity tenfold.” - Gustavo Viceconti, President and CEO at NeuralSoft
”Our company is free to build our vision of a hybrid virtual environment, with multiple hypervisors and the option of moving workloads between them. Dell's commitment to open architecture design in the Virtual Integrated System gives me confidence that I can evolve my environment seamlessly.” - Golan Ben-Oni, Chief Security Officer and Senior Vice-President of Network Architecture at IDT Telecom
“Cloud computing is the emerging frontier for IT and there's no doubt it's providing customers with demonstrable benefits in terms of cost savings and agility. Dell's VIS architecture is unique in that it works with a customer's existing architecture and their current products and investments - whether from Dell or another provider. Customers absolutely value this flexibility and approach to meeting their IT challenges.” - Kobus de Beer, Enterprise Brand Manager, Dell South Africa.
Additional information:
* Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Demo
* Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager Whitepaper
* Dell VIS Self-Service Creator
* Dell Data Center Solutions
* Dell Virtualisation Solutions
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