Go virtual! says Dell

BANGALORE, INDIA: Dell has launched its latest virtualization solutions for the server and storage infrastructure, while indicating a move to cover the desktop environment.

Pallab Talukdar, director, enterprise solutions group, Dell India, while speaking to CIOL at a press conference to announce the launch of its new virtualization servers said, that they “plan to include desktop virtualization, under flexible computing.”

The Dell PowerEdge R805 and R905 servers are priced Rs 2 lakh and Rs 3 lakh, respectively, and claims to offer double the memory and I/O capacity compared to typical 2 socket servers. Customers also have a choice of Vmware ESXi 3.5 or Citrix Xenserver Express integrated Hypervisors. New online advisor tools and ecommerce capability are an added advantage, says Dell.

With virtualization technology portended to be the highest impact trend in infrastructure and operations through 2012 by tech research firm Gartner, Dell aims to cash in on the enterprises looking to cut costs and complexity by consolidating their IT infrastructure.

Dell believes that there is further scope for reducing cost and complexity for enterprises where 70 percent of the IT budget is spent on maintenance with little left for innovation.

“The issue is not so much the cost of acquisition, but to keep things going,” said Talukdar.  Hence, the drive to “move applications to run on lesser servers, providing substantial scope for reducing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).”

The focus is also on manageability and day-to-day operations, wherein, routine tasks could be automated leading to reduction in costs incurred, said Talukdar. Improved Quality of Service (QoS) through rapid deployment, high availability and easier disaster recovery and business continuity are projected as some of the strong points of the solutions, while providing capacity on-demand, which is key to business agility.

This apart, the Dell EqualLogic storage arrays offers SAN integration with VMware Site Recovery Manager for data protection and disaster recovery for virtualized environments.

While virtualization among storage infrastructure is also key to consolidation, Talukdar points out that with just virtualising the disks, the storage boxes had to be managed separately, while the Dell solution looks to cover the SAN.

Dell has expanded its virtualization services to include:

Virtualization simplification workshop – for customers looking to determine which options are the most suitable for their specific business needs;



New virtualization operational assessment and process automation – to accelerate selection of the right technology and define processes;

New virtualization healthclock – to review existing virtualized production environments, identify technology, etc;

Expanded virtualization assessment – taking into account multi-vendor virtualization considerations, advanced storage options and green IT data center; and Design and Implementation Services and pro-support remote advisory services.