Inside Enterprise IT

What do you think of this time of year? Kids returning to school? Football season? True, but September is now all about virtualization, literally. With Microsoft’s launch earlier this week of its embedded Hyper-V and VMworld just around the corner in Las Vegas, the timing is just right for Dell to introduce its new virtualization solutions.

And yet, the timing really doesn’t have anything to do with what Dell, Microsoft, VMware and others are announcing. The fact is that the market and our customers are demanding virtualization. Customers have under-utilized servers, power and cooling issues, and are facing increasing energy and facility costs to expand their datacenters to meet the increasing needs of their internal clients. These were some of the discussion points during our earlier virtualization launch in May of this year. During that launch, we introduced the PowerEdge R805 and PowerEdge R905, some of the first servers on the market to be designed specifically for customers looking to virtualize their environments.

According to Yankee Group, approximately 72 percent of businesses affirmed that they have already deployed or plan to deploy virtualization solutions. Now that virtualization is a mainstream technology, the question isn’t “will businesses virtualize?” – the question is “when will businesses virtualize their datacenters?” And then the question all those customers will ask is which company is best positioned to provide the platforms and services to make the rollout a success.

We today issued a five-page news release on the myriad announcements but let me net them out for you here.

• The PowerEdge M905 and PowerEdge M805 full-height blades, designed and built from the ground up by Dell engineers to be optimized for virtualization environments. The M905 has taken home top performance numbers in industry standard benchmarks;
• Microsoft® Windows Server 2008™ with Hyper-V™ available as a factory-installed option on Dell PowerEdge servers;
• Partnerships with PlateSpin and Vizioncore, two virtualization management companies;
• Advanced EqualLogic integration across industry hypervisors for simplified data protection, recovery and backup;
• The Dell EqualLogic PS5500E offering 24 or 48 terabytes of raw capacity in a 4U array – more than doubling the density and tripling the capacity of previous models;
• New services designed to simplify the design, deployment, security and management of virtualized environments including new infrastructure consulting services for Microsoft Hyper-V deployments, site recovery manager services for VMware environments and new lifecycle management services for VMware environments.

As you can see, our approach to virtualization is different from what others are talking about. We're not announcing just hardware or just software or services. We're once again introducing a full suite of hardware (built by Dell engineers from the ground up as virtualization platforms), software and partnerships, and related virtualization services. Our aim is to remove the complexity around virtualization. Good stuff.