Dell unveils open solutions for the virtual era

At a time when competitors are producing increasingly proprietary products, Dell announced open, standards-based solutions that let customers of all sizes integrate new technologies without sacrificing performance or their existing IT investments.

Dell's new solutions and flexible services free customers to capitalise on the 'Virtual Era' of the technology industry and realise new levels of efficiency, with a goal of reducing data management costs by up to 50% and making room in budgets for the strategic investments they need to make now.

“Enterprise innovation and efficiency depends on solutions that are open, capable and affordable,” said Kobus de Beer, enterprise brand manager, Dell southern Africa. “Dell is uniquely open and un-tethered to legacy assets and proprietary approaches to deliver against these needs. The CIO agenda isn't about managing OPEX at the expense of CAPEX, or, innovation at the expense of open. It is about driving efficiency without compromise.”

More than ever, customers are dealing with two fundamental pain points - storing and sorting the explosion of data, and managing and operating the infrastructure and applications needed to run the business.

Dell today announced solutions targeted at these pain points through innovative end-to-end solutions that leverage the Perot Systems and KACE acquisitions and Dell's industry-leading partner ecosystem. Dell will deliver these solutions to customers the way they want them - in business-ready configurations or via the cloud as a service.

The need for Dell's new approach is great, given the explosion of data companies face today. According to IDC, at nearly 500 exabytes - or 500 billion gigabytes - the “Digital Universe”, if converted to pages of text and assembled into books, would stretch to Pluto and back 10 times. IDC estimates that the Digital Universe will double every 18 months.

Dell today announced Intelligent Data Management solutions that utilise the company's leadership in storage hardware, software and data management services to help customers facing unprecedented challenges storing and managing data to transform that information into a strategic asset, including:

* Next-gen object storage - The new Dell DX Object Storage Platform will use a self-managing peer-scaling architecture that enables customers to access, store and distribute billions of files or other digital content, from archiving all the way to the cloud. This will be released later this year.
* Deduplication - Dell's new deduplication offerings include the Dell/EMC DataDomain Series and the PowerVault DL2100. Dell offers deduplication consulting services that can help customers leverage these technologies.
* Unified storage - Today Dell introduced Dell|EMC NS Series, an efficient platform for consolidating a wide array of environments and applications.
* Data Archiving Consulting - Dell services reduce the cost and complexity associated with inefficient data management and help effectively align storage assets with business requirements.

Last week, Dell announced nine new PowerEdge blade, rack-mount and tower servers updated with Intel's new Xeon 5600 “Westmere-EP” series of processors. With these systems, customers can realise better overall system performance increases of up to 69% and energy efficiency improvements of up to 47% compared to Dell PowerEdge servers with Xeon 5500 processor technology. Dell will also be rolling out new high-performance, high-density PowerEdge solutions based on Intel “Nehalem EX” processors.

In addition, Dell today announced enhancements to its Intelligent Infrastructure and Management products and services to help customers build a solid foundation for the efficient data center.

* Intelligent infrastructure - Dell is driving intelligence into its server platforms with the inclusion of Lifecycle Controller, the industry's only embedded systems management, which provides IT administrators with the means to deploy and remediate servers quickly. Independent tests show that with Dell embedded management that the Dell PowerEdge R710 delivered up to 58% faster pre-OS deployment than the HP ProLiant DL380 G6.
* Simplified infrastructure management - The latest release of the Dell Management Console includes a new power monitoring feature that provides greater awareness of server power consumption which can lead to lower energy use and cost savings.
* Remote support services - Dell Remote Support services with Proactive Systems Management enables customers to make actionable, proactive decisions about their IT environment. Automated diagnostic capabilities allow for faster resolution of hardware issues. This software-as-a-service offering comes at no additional cost to current Dell support customers.
* Remote management services - Dell Remote infrastructure Monitoring allows IT departments to monitor critical remote systems for hardware and software faults, performance degradation, missing patches and security vulnerabilities, and remotely remediate problems.

“Customers today are faced with a choice in determining their next-generation data centre architectures in an effort to support a world where users, information, and business processes are becoming increasingly distributed, mobile, and dynamic. Brocade and Dell offer customers open, standards-based IT solutions that help them become more agile while driving down costs. To this partnership, Brocade brings an industry-leading portfolio of end-to-end networking solutions that provide data centre-class reliability, performance, scalability, and the highest levels of data integrity.” - Dave Stevens, Chief Technology Officer, Brocade.

“Virtualisation unlocks the power of computing in ways that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. From desktop virtualisation to cloud and data centre solutions, Citrix and Dell are working together closely to help customers transform IT into a simpler, more flexible on-demand service.” - Wes Wasson, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer at Citrix Systems.

"EMC and Dell are continuing to strengthen and expand our nearly nine-year strategic partnership to deliver innovative solutions that help our customers cost-effectively manage their information. As customers increasingly virtualise their data centres and adopt cloud computing models, we are working closely with Dell to offer industry leading unified storage and data deduplication solutions that will provide customers with the flexibility to make this transition as seamless as possible." - Jeffrey Casale, EMC's Senior Vice-President for Channels and OEMs.

“Microsoft's and Dell's portfolios of data centre solutions address two primary customer pain points - need for greater agility in IT operations and reduced complexity of data centre management. We are committed to investing in infrastructure and application management solutions that meet today's and the future needs of our customers. Delivering seamless hardware management integration will drive greater business value and will enable customers to maximise their technology investments.” - Brad Anderson, corporate vice-president, Management and Services Division at Microsoft Corp.

“VMware and Dell have a long history of collaboration to deliver innovative solutions that help customers drive down capital and operating costs, increase the availability and agility of infrastructure and applications, and conserve energy resources. We continue to pursue common goals of helping customers maintain control over their data centres, with solutions that will streamline deployment and management while retaining flexibility through an open, integrated approach to IT.” - Bogomil Balkansky, vice-president, product marketing, Server Business Unit, VMware.

* Direct2Dell Blog
* Dell Enterprise Inside IT Blog
* Efficient Enterprise
* Follow the conversation about the #VirutalEra on Twitter
* Images of new Dell solutions for the Virtual Era can be found on Dell's Official Flicker Photostream