Dell brings an 'Open' Cloud and DC stack

BANGALORE, INDIA: A new strategy seems to be shaping up at Dell as it brings out what it calls new, integrated, interoperable and modular platforms empower customers to build highly virtualized datacenters and cloud computing platforms.

At a time when competitors are producing increasingly proprietary products, Dell today announced open, standards-based solutions that let customers of all sizes integrate new technologies without sacrificing performance or their existing IT investments.

Dell’s new solutions and flexible services free customers to capitalize on the ‘Virtual Era’ of the technology industry and realize new levels of efficiency, with a goal of reducing data management costs by up to 50 per cent and making room in budgets for the strategic investments they need to make now.

“Enterprise innovation and efficiency depends on solutions that are open, capable and affordable,” said Sameer Garde, Country General Manager for Dell India. “Dell is uniquely open and un-tethered to legacy assets and proprietary approaches to deliver against these needs. The CIO agenda isn’t about managing OPEX at the expense of CAPEX, or, innovation at the expense of open. It is about driving efficiency without compromise and reinvesting the savings towards innovation and returning shareholder value.”

More than ever, customers are dealing with two fundamental pain points – storing and sorting the explosion of data, and managing and operating the infrastructure and applications needed to run the business.

Dell today announced solutions targeted at these pain points through an innovative end-to-end approach that leverages new and existing technology assets, including the Perot Systems and KACE acquisitions, and Dell’s industry-leading partner ecosystem. Dell will deliver these solutions to customers the way they want them – in business-ready configurations or via the cloud as a service.

According to Sally Stevens, VP, Platform Marketing at Dell, “Our strategy is to help CIO’s achieve enterprise efficiency with a new approach to IT operations and innovative Intelligent Data Management. That strategy is built on a firm foundation of Intelligent Infrastructure. We have a rich heritage of providing companies and organizations of all sizes the essential building blocks of a flexible infrastructure – industry standard servers, storage, networking and solutions.”

The need for Dell’s new approach is great, given the explosion of data companies face today. According to IDC, at nearly 500 exabytes – or 500 billion gigabytes – the “Digital Universe,” if converted to pages of text and assembled into books, would stretch to Pluto and back 10 times. IDC estimates that the Digital Universe will double every 18 months.

Last week Dell announced nine new PowerEdge blade, rack-mount and tower servers updated with Intel’s new Xeon 5600 “Westmere-EP” series of processors. It addeds that with these systems customers can realize better overall system performance increases of up to 69 per cent and energy efficiency improvements of up to 47 per centcompared to Dell PowerEdge servers with Xeon 5500 processor technology. 

Dell will also be rolling out new high-performance, high-density PowerEdge solutions based on Intel “Nehalem EX” processors.

In addition, Dell today announced enhancements to its Intelligent Infrastructure and Management products and services to help customers build a solid foundation for the Efficient Datacenter. 

“Microsoft’s and Dell’s portfolios of datacenter solutions address two primary customer pain points—need for greater agility in IT operations and reduced complexity of datacenter management.  We are committed to investing in infrastructure and application management solutions that meet today’s and the future needs of our customers. Delivering seamless hardware management integration will drive greater business value and will enable customers to maximize their technology investments.” -- Brad Anderson, corporate vice president, Management and Services Division at Microsoft Corp.

“VMware and Dell have a long history of collaboration to deliver innovative solutions that help customers drive down capital and operating costs, increase the availability and agility of infrastructure and applications, and conserve energy resources.  We continue to pursue common goals of helping customers maintain control over their datacenters, with solutions that will streamline deployment and management while retaining flexibility through an open, integrated approach to IT.” - Bogomil Balkansky, vice president, product marketing, Server Business Unit, VMware.

“Gartner is constantly tracking the solutions and services market in India and we feel that Dell’s approach  to provide end-to-end solutions with an open approach allows customers a choice to decide whats best for their needs. Dell seems to provide a comprehensive solution scope should go a long way in addressing both operational and data management challenges thus allowing it to enhance its offerings.” – Diptarup Chakraborti, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner

“Addressing both IT Operational and Data Management challenges, Dell has outlined its intent to provide end-to-end solutions with an approach that is expected to allow customers to make a need-based choice. With an aim of complementing its Data Center Solutions business, Dell has also outlined a dedicated focus on private Cloud Computing environments and is targeting the infrastructure needs of few of the leading Cloud names in the industry. Dell’s partnership with Microsoft on its Windows Azure platform is one of such collaborations.” – Sanchit Vir Gogia, Associate Research Manager – Software, Springboard Research.