Dell has announced new products, management tools and infrastructure consulting services designed to provide customers a smarter path to virtualisation. With this announcement, Dell offers its channel partners a broad line-up of virtualisation solutions that help customers simplify and lower the cost of managing their IT environments. “The question isn’t will businesses virtualise, but when and who can provide the platforms and services to make the rollout a success,” said Pallab Talukdar, director, enterprise business, Dell India.
“While our competitors thrive on complexity to push proprietary hardware, management and services lock-ins, Dell’s virtualisation strategy is grounded in choice and defined by industry standards. By offering our customers the latest, industry-proven, technologies, services and reference architectures, we are helping simplify their IT operations without limiting their options for future growth,” added Talukdar.
Dell’s new full-height blade servers, the PowerEdge M905 and PowerEdge M805, leverage the virtualisation design of the PowerEdge R805 and R905. The PowerEdge M905 delivers the four-socket blade-based virtualisation performance and is claimed to be the first blade server to support 11 tiles and 66 Virtual Machines (VM) in VMmark testing.
The PowerEdge M805 delivers the same number of DIMM slots in a two-socket blade that requires a four-socket blade from either HP or IBM. With a choice of hypervisors including Citrix XenServer, VMware, and now Microsoft Hyper-V, PowerEdge servers can deliver the optimal platform for virtualised environments. The Dell PowerEdge M805 and M905 servers are now available worldwide with a starting price of $1,699 and $4,999, respectively. Also available later this month, the updated PowerEdge R900 rack-mounted system.
In addition to the new servers, Dell announced full, high-speed 10Gb Ethernet and 8Gb Fibre Channel switches and mezzanine cards designed to provide customers increased bandwidth and performance. The company also announced an OEM solution from PlateSpin, a Novell company, including PlateSpin PowerConvert software, which enables enterprises to optimise their data centre by streaming server workloads over the network between physical servers, virtual hosts and image archives.
Dell is also utilising PlateSpin PowerRecon for the planning and assessment of customer virtualisation projects as part of its Virtual Readiness Assessment (VRA). In addition, Dell will sell and support PlateSpin’s broader solutions which provide customers with a unified suite to help them adopt, manage and extend their use of server virtualisation in the data centre.
Dell has also announced integration and support of Microsoft’s new virtualisation technologies. Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V is available as a factory-installed option on Dell PowerEdge servers. Also available for PowerEdge servers, Microsoft’s new System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 which provides unified management for Hyper-V and other hypervisors in multi-vendor environments.
Dell and Microsoft’s simplified approach to systems management helps customers increase efficiency, maximise resources and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO). Dell has invested thousands of hours in the development of field readiness and expertise around Windows Server 2008 implementation and server virtualisation. Microsoft’s server virtualisation rapid deployment programme has enabled Dell to establish field experience implementing highly available solutions with Hyper-V and SCVMM, serving hundreds of thousands of users.
Dell, along with its partners, has integrated advanced storage technologies to help customers simplify these processes. The new Auto-Snapshot Manager/VMware Edition for EqualLogic storage arrays delivers automated, integrated and scalable protection of VMware Infrastructure 3 environments. Its direct integration with VMware Virtual Center and use of VMware File System’s folder structure helps simplify data protection issues especially as virtualised environments scale. The company expects to have ASM/VE available by the end of the month as a free download for customers with valid support contracts.
Dell today announced new services designed to simplify the design, deployment, security and management of virtualised environments including: Infrastructure Consulting Services for Microsoft Hyper-V deployments -– a comprehensive assessment, design and implementation service to accelerate deployment of Microsoft virtualisation technologies (the WS2008 Hyper-V Technology Introduction is available starting at $15,700); Site Recovery Manager (SRM) for VMware environments -– automates VMware disaster recovery with implementation, on-site installation and configuration of Site Recovery Manager; and Lifecycle Management for VMware environments –- design and implementation planning, with proof-of-concept for installation and configuration of the lifecycle manager in customers VMware environments.