Dell led a four-vendor enterprise pitch in Johannesburg today, focusing on standards-based consolidation of servers and storage. Its partners - EMC, Microsoft and Intel - rounded out its vision of the reliability, availability and scalability (RAS) features of today`s Wintel platforms.
Dell is selling a vision of Intel-based, Windows-powered networked storage and infrastructure. Consolidation via networks, operating system and architecture allows for logical, physical, workload and application "pooling" of resources, said Dell SA enterprise director, Tony Bogatie.
This provides better server utilisation than traditional standalone systems, better manageability, lower cost, enterprise performance and interoperability, the companies said.
Dell`s 2001 partnership with EMC, in terms of which they co-market and co-develop direct-attached storage (DAS), network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area networks (SAN), is in force until 2008.
Frank Touwen, EMC SA MD, said while DAS took up 70% of storage devices in 2001, and NAS only 30%, this ratio will be reversed by 2006. "Networked storage benefits companies by taking backup traffic off the network, improving reliability and data integrity and managing storage better. Scalability outwards means one can re-allocate storage as and when needed, so previous under-utilisation because of a failure to integrate is now taken care of."
Touwen estimates that servers are often more than 50% under-used. The financial implications are self-evident when examining the cost-benefits of moving from DAS to NAS to SAN, he said. There is a typical reduction of 46c-49c/MB of moving up in the food chain. Networked storage, which uses ATA drives and not tape, further benefit companies in that they can do upgrades, backup and archiving on the fly without powering down servers.
Microsoft enterprise director Brett Parker highlighted the improved scalability (upwards to high transaction levels, downwards to any device and outwards, for redeploying servers) and reliability (better security and availability through partitioning) of Windows 2003. Intel country manager Steve Nossel outlined the company`s support for redundancy, performance improvements and multi-processing platforms.
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