Building the Efficient Enterprise with Dell, Intel, and VMware vSphere 4

In today’s highly automated, technology-enabled economy, business success has become inextricably linked to IT capability. But IT infrastructures have grown increasingly complex, inflexible, and costly, and constraints on power, cooling, and space place limits on data center growth. Enterprises can spend a major part of their IT budgets simply to maintain the status quo—often leaving the business starved for new and updated capabilities.

With the emergence of standards-based architectures, virtualization, and ubiquitous high-speed connectivity, cloud computing technology is primed to form the basis for a new, highly efficient enterprise IT infrastructure that can help to reduce capital and operational expenses, enable rapid scale-up and scale-down capacity to enhance business agility and minimize up-front technology investments, and enable organizations to shift IT resources from simply keeping the data center running to advancing strategic business goals.

The key to reaching these goals is to take a holistic approach to building an efficient enterprise—which is why Dell, Intel, and VMware have collaborated to establish a vision of the fully virtualized data center that includes not only servers but also storage, networking, and I/O. By virtualizing resources across the data center, enterprises can optimize efficiency and flexibility by creating an internal cloud. Built on virtualization-optimized hardware and software platforms such as the VMware® vSphere™ 4 cloud OS platform, 11th-generation Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers with the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series, advanced Dell EqualLogic™ Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage area network (SAN) arrays, and expanded Dell Business Ready Configurations, the efficient enterprise model can help IT departments increase the value of both new and existing virtualization investments, providing the flexibility required for enterprise data centers both today and in the future.

Also covered: How Frederick Memorial Hospital used VMware vSphere 4 to transform itself into an efficient enterprise.

By Andrew Gilman, Mike Monthei, and Andrew I. Fields

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