Dell unveils new enterprise solutions that help customers deliver results faster

Dell today announced a suite of powerful new enterprise solutions to help customers deliver results faster. Organisations today are dealing with quickly changing and often unpredictable demands and require end-to-end IT solutions that allow them to respond rapidly to customer needs.

With this announcement, Dell is delivering an end-to-end IT platform that raises the bar on customer-centric innovation which provides simplified management, increased performance and superior long-term value.

“Customers tell us they want a high-performance infrastructure that is easy to manage and helps them quickly deliver business outcomes. Today we are introducing a new set of data centre infrastructure solutions that share key capabilities across our entire portfolio, from servers to storage to networking,” said Kobus De Beer, Dell Enterprise Manager South Africa.

“We accomplished this through a combination of strategic acquisitions such as Force10 and customer-centric engineering of our new 12th Generation PowerEdge servers and storage platforms, delivering an integrated infrastructure with a common, high performance network fabric. When combined with the second generation of embedded systems management in our servers, Dell is delivering one of the most robust and easy to manage data centre infrastructures in the industry.”

Dell announced a full portfolio of 12th Generation blade, rack and tower PowerEdge servers optimised to run mission-critical business applications. Dell designed and built its 12th Generation servers with input from more than 7 700 customer conversations in 17 countries across four continents - focusing on their needs for innovation to deliver business results faster. The new Dell PowerEdge servers work seamlessly with Dell's storage and networking products and deliver innovations, such as:

* Turn data into insights faster: Dell lays the foundation to extend the Fluid Data Architecture to the server. With Dell Express Flash, the industry's first, front accessible, hot swappable PCIe solid state disks connected directly to the server, Dell can provide up to 10.5 times more Microsoft SQL Server transactions per second than HDD storage. Dell CacheCade data accelerator can provide up to 28 times quicker queries on Oracle databases.
* Streamlining and automating essential systems management tasks: Dell extends its systems management capabilities with its second generation of embedded server management tools that efficiently manage the deployment, updating, monitoring and maintenance of server lifecycle. Dell's new PowerEdge servers deliver bare-metal deployment and provisioning that requires up to 85.5% less engineer time and 86% fewer manual steps. This extension of Dell's systems management capabilities is expected to build on functionality in its 11th generation of servers, which saved Vitacore customers up to 43 days of system administrator time per year.
* Driving energy-efficiency to bring a breath of fresh air to the data centre: Building on Dell's history of enabling the world's most energy-efficient data centres with Microsoft Bing and others, Dell is bringing a breath of fresh air to all data centres with its 12th Generation PowerEdge Servers. With Dell fresh air IT equipment, a data centre can realise an estimated (US) $3 000 000 in capital expenditures.

Dell also announced the next-generation EqualLogic PS Series storage arrays, which combine fast networking bandwidth with increased storage capacity in a smaller footprint than previous generations.

* EqualLogic PS6110 Series: ideal for mid-sized deployments with multiple physical or virtual servers. These arrays are configured with both optical (SFP+) and copper (10GBASE-T) 10GbE networking, supporting data centre flexibility. With up to 72 terabytes in a single array and 1.2 petabytes in a single group, customers can easily scale when needed by adding additional arrays into an existing EqualLogic group without downtime or forklift upgrades.
* EqualLogic PS4110 Series: Dell's first 10GbE EqualLogic entry-point arrays can provide the same benefits and features as PS6110 Series and are designed for smaller deployments and remote office locations. The systems support up to 36 terabytes in a single array and 72 terabytes in a single group.

Dell's Virtual Network Architecture (VNA) is an open framework for virtualising, automating and orchestrating network services in data centre, campus and branch environments. Dell Virtual Network Architecture provides for an end-to-end 10GbE framework, which includes 10GbE Top-of-Rack and 10/40GbE distributed core fabrics. In the six months since acquiring Force10 Networks, Dell has dramatically extended the global availability of its products by more than 40% to more than 80 countries and added nearly 600 customers.

Dell unveiled vStart for Dell Private Cloud, which is designed help businesses rapidly deploy their own private cloud. vStart for Dell Private Cloud will enable businesses to accelerate application and IT service delivery through a converged, pre-built infrastructure solution which includes the new 12th Generation PowerEdge server, storage, networking and management components.

“Dell continues to invest significantly in its enterprise capabilities and has made impressive progress to become a trusted enterprise IT solutions vendor. Today we're seeing the next big push from Dell as it focuses on solving its customers' biggest pain points by delivering design innovation and operational efficiency for data centres of all sizes. Dell has optimised its entire portfolio of PowerEdge servers to address the most demanding workloads and to seamlessly scale from small businesses to its largest enterprise customers. As an industry leader for automated systems management solutions, Dell has already shipped millions of servers with these robust enterprise capabilities embedded. And with the technology advancements that Dell unveiled today across storage, networking, virtualization, data integration and computing, it's clear that the company is laser focused on growing its share of the enterprise market.” - Matt Eastwood, Group Vice-President, Enterprise Platform Research, IDC

“We are planning the transformation of our existing virtualisation platform into a private cloud for 2012. The Dell PowerEdge M620 is our preferred platform because the main RAM can be expanded significantly, making it ideal for this purpose,” said Max Wagener, Head of Enterprise Architecture, GfK. “The databases that we're planning to virtualise are quite memory-hungry, so the large memory capacity of the Dell PowerEdge M620 will give us the capability to consolidate them. After virtualising most of our other applications and Web servers, this is the next logical step for us.”

Availability:
* Dell's 12th Generation PowerEdge Servers are available today.
* The Dell EqualLogic PS6110 and Dell EqualLogic PS4110 Series storage arrays are available today.
* vStart for Dell Private cloud is available today.
* Dell Networking 10GbE solutions are available today.