Organisations across EMEA turn to Dell for complete enterprise IT solutions to support growth

Dell`s Scalable Enterprise strategy continues to provide superior value to customers across Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) by delivering practical and efficient solutions to enterprise customers and standardising core elements to help lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) and effectively manage business growth.

To meet today`s business needs Dell is helping organisations to simplify operations, improve utilisation and cost-effectively scale through delivering a complete IT solution, helping them protect their investment into the future.

Dell`s EMEA customers that are already enjoying the benefits of its Scalable Enterprise strategy include GIE Groupe Nation (France), New Charter Housing Trust Group (UK), Sherry FitzGerald (Ireland), DE-Consult (Germany) and the City of Amersfoort (Netherlands).

Tom Meyer, director, Enterprise Systems Group, IT analyst house IDC, confirms: "The metrics of evaluating IT infrastructure and IT purchasing are changing. The consensus is that enterprise infrastructure needs to become more flexible, interoperable, scalable and business solutions focused. Effectively, this means providing visible returns, investment protection and choice often through using standard, proven technology and packages."

Ben McDonald, enterprise product manager, says: "We are working with a growing number of enterprise customers across EMEA to help them better focus on their needs both today and into the future and enable them to gain control over their IT infrastructures. By simplifying operations and improving resource utilisation, organisations are becoming better equipped to both meet today`s demands as well as efficiently add capacity as their needs grow."

Groupement d`Int'er^ets Economiques (GIE) Groupe Nation combines the staff and IT services of a number of leading French mutual insurance companies. Due to a constant increase in the number of base files it had to store, its disk-based storage began to exceed 90%, so GIE examined scalable storage options in anticipation of further growth. GIE has implemented a Dell | EMC storage area network (SAN), with a capacity of four terabytes.

Francois Vincent, production manager, GIE Groupe Nation, says: "Even though the size of our company is relatively small, IT is an essential part of it. That is why during installation and also in the long-term, it was imperative for us to have an extremely reliable system. With regard to our configuration and our budget, the Dell | EMC SAN was the most suitable solution for our company."

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New Charter Housing Trust Group`s IT team needed expert advice to guarantee the cost-effective delivery of an enterprise-class network that supported industry-standard Microsoft solutions. It successfully migrated to a new network that delivers Microsoft Windows Server on Dell hardware, providing simplified management with best-of-breed resiliency and cost-effective scalability.

John Westwood, IS services, New Charter Housing Trust Group, says: "Working with Dell Services, we maximised the value of our IT investment by deploying an infrastructure with operating systems that improve the cost-effectiveness of our IS department."

Irish property and financial services company Sherry FitzGerald was facing time-consuming and costly maintenance across its 20 branch offices. The company decided to improve and consolidate its IT infrastructure across its core sites. It engaged with Dell Services to provide a fully integrated solution that delivered application consolidation, server and storage consolidation, and support. Dell also supplied a range of hardware including a Dell | EMC SAN and Dell PowerEdge servers.

Brian Dooley, IT manager, Sherry FitzGerald, says: "The goal of the project was to deliver productivity benefits along with administrative and soft cost savings. Dell has provided exactly what we needed with the right level of quality support. It delivered a great solution at a highly competitive price and an exceptional level of service. Perhaps the biggest advantage of the project for us was the implementation of the SAN. Our data requirements were far exceeding the amount of storage space we had available. Now we know that we have a reliable storage solution that will scale to cope with our requirements in the future."

DE-Consult, a subsidiary of the Deutsche Bahn AG (German Railway), has worked for the last 36 years as a consultant to companies and institutions involved in various transport sectors. A key aim of the project was to ensure that DE-Consult`s data centre could cope with the increased number of projects being managed around the world. DE-Consult installed VMware ESX Server on Dell PowerEdge 2850 servers and, to ensure the project progressed smoothly, worked with Dell Services.

By employing this solution, the company uses fewer physical servers to sustain greater computing capacity, enabling it to respond quickly to fluctuating demands in a more controlled, flexible and cost-effective manner. With scalability also built into the solution, the total cost of ownership (TCO) has also been significantly reduced.

Gunter Holley, IT manager at DE-Consult, says: "The combination of Dell servers and VMware ESX Server now forms a central pillar of our IT infrastructure. It enables us to get the most out of our existing servers, which gives us considerable savings in our daily IT operations. What is more, this infrastructure has resulted in a high degree of flexibility in reacting to future IT requirements.