Begin your end-to-end virtualization journey with Dell Storage at VMworld

Hey everyone! Today we are in beautiful San Francisco for the 10th Annual VMworld US Conference. Dell is a 2013 Global Diamond Sponsor and we will be there in full force with solutions and products that will make your end-to-end virtualization journey not only possible, but simple! From servers, storage and networking to software and cloud offerings, we can help you achieve your goals. The Dell Software Group will be in attendance providing a preview of our full software suite of tools like Dell Foglight for Virtualization and vRanger. While I won’t be there, David Glynn  will be and you can find him at the Dell booth 1219 where he’ll be running technology previews on the show floor.

It wouldn’t be VMworld without a ton of cool stuff in our booth, so I invite you to come on by and talk to David and our various specialists who can help address your toughest challenges. Make sure you preview the updated vCenter and vSphere plug-ins—the latest and greatest in hypervisor integration from the EqualLogic and Compellent storage lines. It’s about more than just having a plug-in to manage storage. These storage integration pieces allow for management and monitoring of your storage infrastructure, as well as provisioning and data protection. They give VMware administrators the power they need to manage their virtual machines and storage.

You’ve become accustomed to using the powerful EqualLogic Host Integration Tools for VMware on your PS Series arrays. While you are visiting our booth, talk to the EqualLogic folks about the Virtual Storage Manager plug-in including the integrations with data protection and disaster recovery features. And learn more about the upcoming release, Dell Compellent vSphere Client Plug-in 2.0, which offers rapid provisioning of storage through the new vSphere web client.  You can easily manage and assign Replay (snapshot) and replication schedules and view statistics for performance planning and monitoring.  

We will have 2 racks of gear running live demos to show off the vCenter plug-ins across the Dell storage portfolio. Ask our Compellent guys about our new Flash-optimized solutions  that tier between SLC and MLC SSDs. These innovative solutions can offer serious cost benefits – the all-flash solution is approximately one-fifth the price versus competitive solutions, and the hybrid-flash solution is approximately one-half the price[1]. Take a close look at the new 5U 84x 4TB drive SC280 dense enclosure that offers the best rack unit density of any major storage solution. This thing is a small beast—in a super cool, data center space-savings way.    

Each of the storage systems have software integration that goes beyond just looking at the SAN. These are advanced platforms that allow the VMware administrator to configure replication and protection of the VMs, roll back virtual machines to various points in time, as well as automate a majority of common day-to-day administrative functions.

We are also bringing some sneak peek stuff to show you. Call it a technology preview if you will. We will have a video demo of the VMware vVols in action. We have shown this in the VMworld keynotes in previous years and it’s amazing to see the next leap in VMware and storage integration! Check out some of our new management tools that are coming out later in the year and see some of the vCOPs integration we are rolling out.  Also, stop by our booth for the following theater presentations:

  • Jason Boche-What is new with Compellent and VMware, Sunday August 25th 6:20 pm
  • Nick Sweere/Vikram Belapurkar-Dell Storage Integrations with VMware,  Wednesday Aug 28th 2:20 pm
  • David Glynn- Dell EqualLogic vCenter Plug-in, Wednesday Aug 28th 4:20 pm

This show is going to be a great one and it doesn’t just stop in the booth. Don’t miss the Dell sessions on desktop virtualization in the cloud or how our Dell Servers and system management tools can help your data center. We’ll see you in San Francisco! In the meantime, follow me (@VirtualWill) and @DellStorage on Twitter and check out the Dell Tech Center VMworld Wiki Page to keep up with the latest updates.


[1] Source: Competitive US list pricing from from Gartner Inc, CP Storage, as of June 2013. Market price calculated assuming a discounting of approximately 50% for all competitive systems and Dell Compellent.

About the Author: William Urban