Dell Enterprise End of Summer Update

While the dog days of summer may be behind us, Dell has been gearing up for the busy fall season ahead in the month of August. From updated solutions, new partnerships and even a whole new business unit, the Dell Enterprise team has been doing a lot, while families take the last of their summer vacations before school and the busy conference season starts back up in the fall.

Datacenter Scalable Solutions

Dell Datacenter Scalable Solutions (DSS) represents a new line of business designed to meet the specific needs of large-scale customers and address a market with x86 server volumes growing three times faster than the traditional x86 server market. This new organization was created to better understand large customers such as web tech, telecommunications service providers, hosting companies, oil and gas and research organizations to determine what capabilities we would need to meet their unique requirements. Dell DSS is now one of the fastest growing businesses in the history of Dell, assisting companies looking for data center architectures that can manage heavy loads, and scale quickly and efficiently as those loads fluctuate.

Scality Partnership

Dell Storage announced a new SDS partnership with object storage vendor, Scality. Scality’s RING software will run on Dell enterprise-class PowerEdge 13th Generation servers and Dell Storage and be connected with Dell Networking to give customers a family of high capacity storage solutions that enable them to efficiently store and manage multiple petabytes of unstructured data. With this new offering, enterprises can now benefit from Scality’s highly reliable, limitlessly scalable architecture combined with the innovation, quality, reliability and support they expect from Dell hardware. Dell continues to offer the industry’s broadest platform of SDS solutions by combining the industry’s leading SDS software with Dell PowerEdge and Dell Storage technology, sustained by Dell Services and Support, demonstrating Dell’s continuing focus on providing optimum solutions for our customers’ needs.

Redfish

Last fall, Dell joined a coalition to create a new industry standard for the management of data center hardware called the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). This task force created the initial Redfish 1.0 specification and it is now available to our customers. Redfish is a server management API standard targeted at data centers that enables improved management simplicity, consistency, scalability and security. Designed to meet end user expectations for simple and interoperable management of modern scalable platform hardware, Redfish takes advantage of widely-used web technologies to minimize the learning curve and help system administrators become more effective.

Rack Scale Architecture ready G5 rack

As the summer season slows down, conference season begins to pick up. The Intel Developer’s Forum (IDF) kicked the season off in San Francisco. There, Dell showed off its Rack Scale Architecture (RSA) ready ‘G5’ rack. This new hardware solution implements Intel RSA software and its API solution for a fully disaggregated hardware, allowing customers to independently upgrade their compute, storage or networking capabilities – coupled with an open-source software layer that will let companies of any size stand up, manage and orchestrate cloud infrastructure. This new solution also adds management extensions to the recently announced Redfish 1.0 specification that will allow administrators to manage ALL of their compute, storage and networking through a single common “southbound” API. This new solution was created for customers to buy only what they need, optimally compose systems for specific workloads, and refresh only what needs upgrading for a true software defined data center.

VMWorld Announcements

We wrapped up August at VMworld in San Francisco, announcing several new and exciting enterprise solutions in partnership with VMware. First, we updated our Dell Engineered Solutions for VMware EVO:RAIL Horizon and Infrastructure Editions. These updates provide improved density, functionality and additional configurations to give customers more options as they scale out their infrastructure. With these solutions, organizations can easily scale performance and bandwidth with additional appliances that can be combined into a single cluster. We also updated our VMware-based hybrid cloud solutions. The Dell Hybrid Cloud Platform Reference Architecture with VMware vRealize now features PowerEdge FX2 and SC Series SAN built around a dense compute platform with an optimized highly virtualized tiered storage area network and modern spine-leaf network architecture. Lastly, we released a new update to Active System Manager (ASM) 8.1.1 which includes a plugin to vRealize Orchestrator (vRO), extending the automation and orchestration capabilities of vRO. We also had a handful of Dell experts at the show speaking on enterprise solutions for the data center to provide a deep dive into the latest and greatest Dell and VMware partnered solutions.

All of these new solutions announced in August allow our customers to be future-ready – to deliver the right IT services at the right time for the right cost in support of their organizational goals. Stay tuned for more future-ready announcements coming your way this fall. We also hope you can join us Oct. 20-22 at Dell World 2015, where these solutions and much, much more will be available for you to explore. And have a safe and happy fall season!

Sarah Vela

About the Author: Sarah Vela

Sarah Vela is no longer with Dell Technologies.