We do convergence better
In a market filled with competitors offering proprietary, complex, fragmented and expensive solutions, Dell stands out uniquely because we address more than just the infrastructure. We give you:
Dell Active Infrastructure empowers you to respond more rapidly to dynamic business needs, maximize efficiency and strengthen your IT service quality. When you accomplish these things, you evolve from an infrastructure-centered, maintenance-focused IT organization to one of innovation that drives business growth. Make the transition with agile, efficient and high-quality convergence solutions from Dell.
Agile IT
Because Dell pre-integrated Active Systems and reference architectures are open and heterogeneous — not proprietary — they quickly and easily interoperate with your existing architecture and can integrate with architectures you may evolve to in the future. This fast interoperability and flexibility empowers you to respond to changing business needs with greater agility.
Our Active Infrastructure solution delivers:
With Dell Active Infrastructure, you can ditch the piecemeal approaches that drive inefficiency and high cost. We help you achieve efficiency across the IT service delivery spectrum, starting with time-saving, pre-integrated Active Systems that are managed by Active System Manager — a single tool that dramatically reduces the number of steps required to deploy IT services.
Combined with our unified services and support, you gain efficiency advantages like:
With Dell, you get an end-to-end converged solution, including unified support and advanced monitoring and optimization software to keep your IT services running at peak performance. Conversely, our competitors offer limited options and fragmented solutions that can ultimately impact the quality of your IT services. With Dell solutions you can:
Talk to a Dell expert to learn more about a Dell Active Infrastructure solution that can transform the way you do IT.
i. Brodart case study — “With Dell Active System’s pre-integrated solutions, Dell customers have seen up to 6x faster implementation of new virtual infrastructure than doing it yourself.”
vStart customer quote: “6-fold faster time to value with pre-cabled, validated virtualization solution.”
ii. “Dell delivers more flexibility to choose your fabric topology with either a single, converged fabric or up to 3 separate fabrics, versus Cisco’s single fabric.”
Dell chassis has 3 fabrics (A, B, and C). Customer can run a single fabric with converged Ethernet and storage traffic, or can choose to run all 3 with isolated traffic for security or performance. Cisco chassis has only 1 fabric, and can only run converged Ethernet and storage traffic.
iii. "Dell’s purpose-built design delivers 26 to 45 percent better performance per watt than HP or Cisco."
Internal testing by Global Solutions Engineering. Comparison uses an industry standard benchmark “SPECpower.” The side-by-side system comparison among Dell, Cisco UCS and HP BladeSystem comprised of a blade chassis, 8.5-height 2S blades (same Intel® processors/memory), blade I/O (input/output) module, and ToR switches from each vendor. The Cisco UCS configuration included a Nexus ToR switch as well as the required UCS Fabric Interconnect/FEX.
iv. "Get more use out of your data center space, with 2.3x more compute nodes per rack from Dell than Cisco, and 2x more than HP."
Dell has 0.25-height blade; Cisco and HP only have 0.5-height blade; Dell blade chassis is more dense than Cisco blade chassis.
M420 allows 32 blades in 10U of space. An entire 42U rack can hold up to 128 M420s.
B200 M3 allows 8 blades in 6U of space. An entire 42U rack can hold up to 56 B200s.
BL460c Gen8 allows 16 blades in 10U of space. An entire 42U rack can hold up to 64 BL460c.
v. "Increase the accuracy of deployment by going from 8 tools to 1 to deploy virtual infrastructure.”
This test includes the number of tools required for configuration of blades, I/O modules, top-of-rack switches, storage with appropriate settings, as well as installation of ESXi, creation of cluster and configuration of virtual infrastructure. The comparison is against the exact same hardware architecture, but using the included tools and manual processes. In both cases, initial configuration steps have been done before the test — things typically done during the initial deployment of the rack (out of band management configuration, network connectivity, installation of management tools, etc). Dell Active System Manager can do these tasks in one tool versus 8 tools in a legacy Dell environment.
vi. “Rapidly respond to the needs of the business using Dell Active System built-in templates and orchestrations to deploy a production-ready virtualization cluster in approximately 99 percent fewer steps than doing it manually.”
This test includes the number of steps an administrator performs for configuration of blades, I/O modules, top-of-rack switches, storage with appropriate settings, as well as installation of ESXi, creation of the cluster and configuration of virtual infrastructure. The comparison is against the exact same hardware architecture, but using the included tools and manual processes. In both cases, initial configuration steps have been done before the test — things typically done during the initial deployment of the rack (out of band management configuration, network connectivity, installation of management tools, etc). There are 8 manual steps with Dell Active System Manager versus 575 manual steps with legacy Dell tools.
- Open and heterogeneous architecture that drives flexibility and agility into your IT environment
- Unified support and intuitive management tools that simplify your IT operations
- An end-to-end support experience that helps you ensure outstanding service consistency and quality for your customers
Dell Active Infrastructure empowers you to respond more rapidly to dynamic business needs, maximize efficiency and strengthen your IT service quality. When you accomplish these things, you evolve from an infrastructure-centered, maintenance-focused IT organization to one of innovation that drives business growth. Make the transition with agile, efficient and high-quality convergence solutions from Dell.
Agile IT
Because Dell pre-integrated Active Systems and reference architectures are open and heterogeneous — not proprietary — they quickly and easily interoperate with your existing architecture and can integrate with architectures you may evolve to in the future. This fast interoperability and flexibility empowers you to respond to changing business needs with greater agility.
Our Active Infrastructure solution delivers:
- Faster deployment — With Dell Active System pre-integrated solutions, our customers have seen up to six-times-faster implementation of new virtual infrastructure over doing it themselves. i*
- Flexible fabric options — With Dell you can choose either a single converged fabric or up to three separate fabrics — compared to Cisco’s single fabric offering. ii*
With Dell Active Infrastructure, you can ditch the piecemeal approaches that drive inefficiency and high cost. We help you achieve efficiency across the IT service delivery spectrum, starting with time-saving, pre-integrated Active Systems that are managed by Active System Manager — a single tool that dramatically reduces the number of steps required to deploy IT services.
Combined with our unified services and support, you gain efficiency advantages like:
- Energy efficiency — 26 to 45 percent better performance per watt than HP or Cisco based on the purpose-built design of Active System 800. iii*
- Industry-leading density — 2.3 times more compute nodes per rack in Dell systems than in Cisco systems, and two times more than in HP systems — so you get more use out of your data center space. iv*
With Dell, you get an end-to-end converged solution, including unified support and advanced monitoring and optimization software to keep your IT services running at peak performance. Conversely, our competitors offer limited options and fragmented solutions that can ultimately impact the quality of your IT services. With Dell solutions you can:
- Increase deployment accuracy by going from eight manual touch points to one to deploy virtual infrastructure. v*
- Automate with templates to ensure consistent results with approximately 99 percent fewer steps to deploy a complex virtualization cluster versus manual processes. vi*
Talk to a Dell expert to learn more about a Dell Active Infrastructure solution that can transform the way you do IT.
i. Brodart case study — “With Dell Active System’s pre-integrated solutions, Dell customers have seen up to 6x faster implementation of new virtual infrastructure than doing it yourself.”
vStart customer quote: “6-fold faster time to value with pre-cabled, validated virtualization solution.”
ii. “Dell delivers more flexibility to choose your fabric topology with either a single, converged fabric or up to 3 separate fabrics, versus Cisco’s single fabric.”
Dell chassis has 3 fabrics (A, B, and C). Customer can run a single fabric with converged Ethernet and storage traffic, or can choose to run all 3 with isolated traffic for security or performance. Cisco chassis has only 1 fabric, and can only run converged Ethernet and storage traffic.
iii. "Dell’s purpose-built design delivers 26 to 45 percent better performance per watt than HP or Cisco."
Internal testing by Global Solutions Engineering. Comparison uses an industry standard benchmark “SPECpower.” The side-by-side system comparison among Dell, Cisco UCS and HP BladeSystem comprised of a blade chassis, 8.5-height 2S blades (same Intel® processors/memory), blade I/O (input/output) module, and ToR switches from each vendor. The Cisco UCS configuration included a Nexus ToR switch as well as the required UCS Fabric Interconnect/FEX.
iv. "Get more use out of your data center space, with 2.3x more compute nodes per rack from Dell than Cisco, and 2x more than HP."
Dell has 0.25-height blade; Cisco and HP only have 0.5-height blade; Dell blade chassis is more dense than Cisco blade chassis.
M420 allows 32 blades in 10U of space. An entire 42U rack can hold up to 128 M420s.
B200 M3 allows 8 blades in 6U of space. An entire 42U rack can hold up to 56 B200s.
BL460c Gen8 allows 16 blades in 10U of space. An entire 42U rack can hold up to 64 BL460c.
v. "Increase the accuracy of deployment by going from 8 tools to 1 to deploy virtual infrastructure.”
This test includes the number of tools required for configuration of blades, I/O modules, top-of-rack switches, storage with appropriate settings, as well as installation of ESXi, creation of cluster and configuration of virtual infrastructure. The comparison is against the exact same hardware architecture, but using the included tools and manual processes. In both cases, initial configuration steps have been done before the test — things typically done during the initial deployment of the rack (out of band management configuration, network connectivity, installation of management tools, etc). Dell Active System Manager can do these tasks in one tool versus 8 tools in a legacy Dell environment.
vi. “Rapidly respond to the needs of the business using Dell Active System built-in templates and orchestrations to deploy a production-ready virtualization cluster in approximately 99 percent fewer steps than doing it manually.”
This test includes the number of steps an administrator performs for configuration of blades, I/O modules, top-of-rack switches, storage with appropriate settings, as well as installation of ESXi, creation of the cluster and configuration of virtual infrastructure. The comparison is against the exact same hardware architecture, but using the included tools and manual processes. In both cases, initial configuration steps have been done before the test — things typically done during the initial deployment of the rack (out of band management configuration, network connectivity, installation of management tools, etc). There are 8 manual steps with Dell Active System Manager versus 575 manual steps with legacy Dell tools.
