BANGALORE, INDIA: Dell, a provider in technology and services, today announced a series of products designed to provide customers a smarter path to virtualization.

Dell also expanded its leadership in offering its channel partners a broad line-up of industry-standard virtualization solutions that help customers simplify and lower the cost of managing their IT environments, said a press release.

“The question isn’t will businesses virtualize, but when, and who can provide the platforms and services to make the rollout a success,” said Pallab Talukdar, director – enterprise business, Dell India.

“While our competitors thrive on complexity to push proprietary hardware, management and services lock-ins, Dell’s virtualization strategy is grounded in choice and defined by industry standards,” he said.

Pallab added that by offering the customers the latest, industry-proven, technologies, services and reference architectures, they are simplifying their IT operations without limiting their options for future growth.

Dell’s new full-height blade servers, the PowerEdge M905 and PowerEdge M805, leverage the innovative virtualization design of the PowerEdge R805 and R905, the release added.

It delivers the ultimate four-socket blade-based virtualization performance and is the first blade server to support 11 tiles and 66 Virtual Machines (VM) in VMmark testing.

In addition to the new servers, it has announced full, high-speed 10Gb Ethernet and 8Gb fibre channel switches and mezzanine cards designed to provide customers increased bandwidth and performance, it added.

The company also announced an OEM solution from PlateSpin, a Novell company, including PlateSpin PowerConvert software that enables enterprises to optimize their data center by streaming server workloads over the network between physical servers, virtual hosts and image archives, it said.

Dell announced integration and support of Microsoft’s new virtualization technologies. Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V is available as a factory-installed option on Dell PowerEdge servers.

The partnering expected to helps customers increase efficiency, maximize resources and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO). The services are designed to simplify the design, deployment, security and management of virtualized environments, said the release.