Virtualization has become a fully mainstream idea, talked about in circles from the IT admin all the way up to the CEO’s office, but there are still a lot of people out there that I talk to that just have their toes in the water, or are waiting to start or to expand their virtualization efforts.
If you aren’t fully tuned into this concept, virtualization can provide many benefits to organizations for increasing availability, enhancing disaster recovery, reducing costs around equipment and management, and more. A key component to getting the most out of virtual server deployments is utilizing shared storage like a storage area network or SAN.
Just like consolidating your servers, consolidating your storage on a SAN can help enable better availability and data protection as well as helping reduce management costs. We have made it one of our goals to simplify and accelerate your virtualization deployments by providing information, products and services to help our customers understand, scope, deploy and get the most out of their virtualization efforts.
We’re doing it again today by announcing enhancements to our CX4 storage arrays and networking products, like a high port count 1GbE blade switch, a 10GbE blade pass through I/O module, a 10GbE blade mezzanine card and 1GbE quad port blade mezzanine cards, and services that better enable consolidation and virtualization.
Our Dell/EMC CX4 storage arrays now support 10Gbit iSCSI (10GbE), along with the already supported 1Gbit iSCSI, 4Gbit Fibre Channel, and 8Gbit Fibre Channel, all on one array. The additional bandwidth from 10GbE can enable support for more virtual machines and reduce the number of connections needed from server to storage. The CX4 has also been enhanced with Virtualization Aware Navisphere, a feature that simplifies storage in virtual environments through automatic discovery of virtual machines and VMware ESX servers, end-to-end virtual-to-physical machine mapping, and advanced search for instant virtual machine discovery.
All this is happening at a great time as we are getting geared up for vmworld next week in San Francisco. You can check out my upcoming booth theatre presentation on the new CX4 capabilities by clicking here.
We hope that if you are there, you’ll participate in some of the many things we have planned to help better inform and educate you on virtualization options.
If you’re not, you can follow @Dellatvmworld on Twitter or check out Dell’s Virtual Tradeshow Booth. Also tune in for Andrew Gilman’s blog this week on all the things we’ll be doing at the show, including live technical demonstrations and in-booth white boarding sessions with our experts that can help you take the next step to improve and simplify your IT.