In March Dell unveiled its Solutions For The Virtual Era strategy and differentiated approach to the datacenter. This announcement showcased our commitment to customers to deliver open enterprise IT solutions that simplify the way technology is deployed, integrated and maintained in today’s data centers. This approach is predicated on Dell’s hallmarks of delivering open, capable and affordable solutions which give customers flexibility now and in the future. Delivering all three is what separates Dell from the rest of the pack.
Today we are building on that strategy by delivering new technology that helps customers dramatically accelerate the benefits of virtualization. New Dell EqualLogic storage products, Dell PowerConnect networking solutions and Dell PowerEdge blade servers , all built on industry-standards, plus new Dell Storage, Virtualization and Support Services, drive organizational and application agility – so customers can focus on innovation as opposed to basic maintenance. Some key highlights include:
Dell EqualLogic and Dell PowerVault Storage Platforms
- New EqualLogic PS6000XVS and PS6010XVS storage arrays combine the advantages of SAS and SSD drives in a single enclosure to improve density and performance. In addition, customers leveraging the EqualLogic 5.0 firmware can now benefit from automated data tiering within the new arrays.
- New advancements in the Dell EqualLogic software architecture dramatically improve the performance and scalability of EqualLogic storage arrays – all at no additional cost to new or existing EqualLogic customers.
- New PowerVault MD3200 and MD3200i storage arrays are ideal for small-to-medium sized businesses looking for an affordable, high performance virtualization platform.
Dell PowerEdge Servers and Systems Management Capabilities
- Dell is introducing three new PowerEdge blades and servers built to help customers improve virtualization performance, flexibility and power efficiency.
- The PowerEdge M710HD blade server is the only high density, memory optimized blade server that supports failsafe redundant embedded hypervisors and hot-swappable SAS or SSD drive options to help ensure customers’ consolidated workloads stay up and running.
- The PowerEdge M610x brings a new set of capabilities to Dell’s blade portfolio providing customers database acceleration, expanded graphics capabilities, GPGPU and other usage models which utilize PCIe expansion cards.
- The PowerEdge R715 is an AMD-based 2U server platform that balances 24 processing cores with a large memory footprint to achieve a good ratio of price/performance. This rack server is ideal for virtualization, workload consolidation and small-to-medium database and network infrastructure deployments.
- Dell also introduced new systems management updates to its Lifecycle Controller, Chassis Management Controller, and Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC) offerings to help customers streamline ongoing maintenance tasks so they can reduce costs and improve efficiency.
Dell PowerConnect Networking Solutions
- Dell is introducing the PowerConnect-J series of products, the first through Dell’s OEM agreement with Juniper.
- The PowerConnect B-Series RX-16, based on Dell’s OEM agreement with Brocade, extends the current family of Dell PowerConnect B-RX chassis switches with a 16-slot, modular chassis to deliver performance and scalability for demanding networks with 10GbE requirements.
- The Dell PowerConnect 8024 Ethernet switch delivers 24 ports of 10GBASE-T and features Layer 3 routing for data center, aggregation and unified fabric deployments.
Dell also has introduced six new Business Ready Configurations to help customers more quickly deploy fully integrated virtualization-ready data center solutions. These offerings leverage the latest technologies from Dell to rapidly accelerate the benefits of virtualization for customers using either VMware or Microsoft hypervisors, with best-of-breed server, storage, networking, and virtualization technologies in pre-configured and fully validated bundles.
Dell will continue to be a driving force to help customers achieve the full potential of this new era, the Virtual Era. For vendors like IBM, HP, and Oracle the agenda centers on lock-in, selling more service opportunities and account control which isn’t in the best interest of the customer. This is why Dell focuses on standards-based, connected technologies. It’s what is right for customers, delivering a converged infrastructure without the lock-in.