Dell's converged infrastructure targets HP, Cisco

data centre with the unveiling on Monday of its converged infrastructure offering, CRN reports.

The architecture combines Dell servers, networking and a new blade version of its EqualLogic storage products, all of which can be managed as a whole within a single enclosure.

The new converged offerings were introduced on the opening day of Dell's second annual Dell Storage Forum, held this week, in Boston.

Converged infrastructure refers to tying server, storage and IP networking into an integrated solution in order to give customers a single vendor source for building data centres and moving towards cloud computing.

Dell says the pre-tested and certified Dell Converged Blade Data Centre solution will provide a dense, end-to-end, 10GbE data centre within a single Dell PowerEdge M1000e blade chassis, Data Center Knowledge writes.

“Dell is redrawing the lines among servers, storage, networking and management to offer customers technology convergence that provides simplicity and improved performance while reducing the operational costs associated with running today's data centres,” says Brad Anderson, president of enterprise solutions group at Dell.

“Our holistic approach helps customers cost-effectively manage the physical, virtual and cloud environments that deliver flexible IT services to support their business goals.”

Dell also unveiled new releases of EqualLogic software that tightly integrate SANs with hosts and applications, eChannel Line notes.

EqualLogic Array Software 6.0 provides real-time data protection with synchronous replication, improved data security and increased efficiency with snapshot borrowing, volume unmap and volume undelete features.