Customers in the 'Virtual Era' demand IT solutions that drive efficiency, rapidly deliver business value and drive innovation without locking organisations into proprietary technology.
Harnessing more than 25 years of expertise in meeting customers' requirements, Dell today unveiled new technology, services, management tools and business ready solutions that preserve customer choice and help customers reduce the time required to build, manage and maintain an efficient data centre.
Building off its industry-leading position and partnerships in storage, servers and networking and services, Dell has pre-integrated the product hardware and systems management capabilities critical to deploying and running various data centre elements as a holistic solution. This approach is designed to deliver significant efficiencies in both OPEX and CAPEX - and deliver on Dell's mission to reduce budget devoted to maintaining the status quo and increasing investment in innovative projects.
As customers look to streamline data centre operations, the combination of next-generation storage platforms and intelligent infrastructure compute models is becoming increasingly important. New Dell EqualLogic storage products, Dell PowerConnect networking solutions and Dell PowerEdge blade servers, all built on industry-standards, plus new Dell Storage, Virtualisation and Support Services, drive organisational and application agility - so customers can focus on innovation as opposed to basic maintenance.
Dell Business Ready Configurations
To help customers more quickly deploy fully integrated virtualisation-ready data centre solutions, Dell is introducing Business Ready Configurations. Business Ready Configurations will help customers reduce the complexity and trial and error involved in deploying virtualisation projects by bringing together best-of-breed server, storage, networking, and virtualisation technologies in pre-configured and fully validated bundles to ensure faster solutions deployments.
These solutions also enable customers using VMware or Microsoft hypervisors to maximise the benefits of existing infrastructure while allowing them to rapidly accelerate the benefits of virtualisation. From customers just starting to deploy virtualised infrastructure for consolidation to the more mature customers looking for high availability, dynamic provisioning and disaster recovery capabilities, Dell has a solution.
Dell's new server, storage, networking products and services include:
* Dell EqualLogic and Dell PowerVault Storage Platforms
* New EqualLogic PS6000XVS and PS6010XVS storage arrays combine the advantages of SAS and SSD drives in a single enclosure to improve density and performance. An extension of Dell's expertise in automated load balancing and data movement technologies, customers deploying the EqualLogic 5.0 firmware can now benefit from automated data tiering within the new arrays.
* New advancements in the Dell EqualLogic software architecture dramatically improves the performance and scalability of EqualLogic storage arrays - all at no additional cost to new or existing EqualLogic customers. With the introduction of EqualLogic 5.0 firmware, VMware infrastructures can dramatically reduce SAN network traffic and CPU utilisation for the copy process by over 95 and CPU utilisation for the copy process by over 75%. The EqualLogic 5.0 firmware will support future developments of the VMware vStorage initiative.
* New PowerVault MD3200 and MD3200i storage arrays are ideal for small-to-medium sized businesses looking for an affordable, high performance virtualisation platform. The MD3200 series of storage arrays provide up to two times the performance, host support and capacity scalability over the previous generation of products.
* Dell PowerEdge Servers and Systems Management Capabilities
* Dell is introducing two new PowerEdge blades and one rack server built to help customers improve virtualisation performance, flexibility and power efficiency.
* The PowerEdge M710HD blade server is designed and optimised for virtual workloads and offers users tremendous I/O flexibility, high memory density, and robust Intel Xeon processing power. It is one of the only high density, memory optimised blade servers in the industry that supports failsafe redundant embedded hypervisors and hot-swappable SAS or SSD drive options to help ensure customers' consolidated workloads stay up and running.
* The PowerEdge M610x brings a new set of capabilities to Dell's blade portfolio providing customers database acceleration, expanded graphics capabilities by integrating powerful PCIe solutions like NVIDIA's new Tesla “Fermi” class GPGPUs or Fusion-IO's ioDrive Duo.
* NVIDIA Tesla 20-series GPGPUs can produce the computational horsepower of an equivalent non-GPGPU quad-core CPU cluster at approximately 1/10th of the cost using about 1/20th the power.
* The PowerEdge R715 is an AMD-based 2U server platform that balances 24 processing cores with a large memory footprint to achieve a good ratio of price/performance. This rack server is ideal for virtualisation, workload consolidation and small-scale database and network infrastructure deployments.
* The M1000e chassis is also being enhanced with next-generation power supplies, ultra-efficient fans, and “bare metal” chassis management tools to help facilitate blade energy efficiency and exceptional performance per watt, as well as setting new standards for usability and manageability.
* Dell is also introducing new systems management updates to its LifeCycle Controller, Chassis Management Controller, and Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC) offerings to help customers streamline ongoing maintenance tasks so they can reduce costs and improve efficiency.
New enhancements include:
* LifeCycle Controller can automatically configure new parts with settings and firmware of prior components.
* A new dynamic graphical user interface comes with CMC, including a homepage designed to simplify and speed up the most frequent administrator tasks.
* Dell PowerConnect networking solutions
* Dell is introducing the PowerConnect-J series of products, the first through Dell's OEM agreement with Juniper, and other new networking products.
* The PowerConnect J-Series EX8200 family provides a new scalable chassis solution for high performance switching and routing in data centre and cloud environments.
* For smaller data centre and branch office environments, the PowerConnect J-Series EX4200 family of switches leverages Virtual Chassis technology to help customers stack and manage up to ten EX4200 switches as a single device.
* The PowerConnect J-Series SRX family of Service Gateway products targets a broad range of security needs including content security, access control and state-of-the-art firewall and virtual private network (VPN) technology.
* Based on Dell's OEM agreement with Brocade, the PowerConnect B-Series RX-16 extends the current family of Dell PowerConnect B-RX chassis switches with a 16-slot, modular chassis to deliver performance and scalability for demanding networks with 10GbE requirements.
* The Dell PowerConnect 8024 Ethernet switch delivers 24 ports of 10GBASE-T and features Layer 3 routing for data centre, aggregation and unified fabric deployments.
Dell services
* Dell today unveiled new storage, virtualisation and support services to provide the expertise needed to reduce the expense and time required to build, manage and maintain an efficient data centre.
* Data management consulting services for EqualLogic help accelerate the integration of the EqualLogic PS series into the data centre, and enables customers to get the most out of their Enterprise class iSCSI SAN in terms of performance for application, data protection strategies and total cost of ownership.
* Dell ProSupport Proactive Maintenance for EqualLogic helps customers avoid problems before they occur. Through scheduled assessments, streamlined patch management and detailed reporting, Proactive Maintenance removes some of the burden of routine IT maintenance, allowing IT personnel to focus on more innovative projects.
* Dell Virtualisation Consulting, which helps drive out inefficiency through standardisation, reducing complexity through application rationalisation, consolidation, virtualisation and automation.
* All Dell PowerEdge, EqualLogic and PowerVault products and solutions mentioned are available through Dell or any of the company's approximately 60 000 global PartnerDirect channel partners.
Pricing and availability
* The Dell EqualLogic PS6000XVS and EqualLogic PS6010XVS will be available in EMEA in early August.
* The EqualLogic 5.0 firmware is available today at no additional charge to existing or new EqualLogic customers.
* The Dell PowerVault MD3200, PowerVault MD3200i and PowerConnect 8024 will be available in EMEA next week.
* The Dell PowerEdge M610x, M710HD and R715 will be available in EMEA in July.
* The PowerConnect-J series of network offerings will be available in EMEA in early July.
* The PowerConnect B-RX16 will be available in EMEA in early August.
Quotes:
“The EqualLogic integration with VMware vStorage APIs works really well, providing dramatically faster operations and reducing the CPU and network load,” said Trevor Rowley, Managing Director at Optix Software, a SAAS business management services company for optical retailers.
“We were able to clone a VMFS volume four times faster with vStorage Data Copy Offload enabled. That makes a big difference for our virtualised database environment, which supports our client-facing clinical and payment services. We will definitely make use of the vStorage integrations with EqualLogic as soon as they are released.”
“Dell continues to reinvent itself and stress the importance of open, capable and affordable IT products and services, said IDC analyst Matt Eastwood, Group Vice-President, Server Platforms. “The company is wise to adopt a balanced approach to leverage private cloud opportunity driven from virtualisation and other transformational IT initiatives. Their vision is clean, understandable and believable and IDC expects that it will resonate well in the market as customers evaluate their IT infrastructure options in the months to come.”
“Organisations benefit from Dell's approach to open, capable and affordable technologies that preserve choice and free up budgets for innovation, and today we are introducing several new product and solution offerings to reinforce that direction,” said Brad Anderson, senior vice-president, Enterprise Product Group, Dell. “With new solutions for virtualisation management, new innovations in our server and storage product lines and expanded service offerings our customers can utilise Dell for the benefits of a converged architecture - dynamic workload allocation, faster time to deployment, seamless management - but they don't want to be locked into a closed technology stack.”
Additional information:
* Dell Unveils Open Solutions for the Virtual Era
* Dell Storage
* Dell PowerEdge Servers
* Dell Virtualization
* Dell Services
Share