Blade

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.

Recently, one of our competitors misstated a couple of key points about Dell’s FlexAddress and I’d like to take a moment to clarify how easy it is to implement and integrate the virtualization system into existing environments. (To tell you the truth, we're a bit flattered as they also have "real stories" about Sun, IBM and EMC, so we must be doing something right.)

Before I do that, though, I’d like to suggest that all IT companies make their respective technologies easier to understand, which will empower customers to see the facts for what they are and make informed decisions – the true spirit of pure competition.

The Basics: What is FlexAddress

• FlexAddress works by locking a server's World Wide Name (WWN for Fibre Channel Fabrics) and Media Access Control (MAC for Ethernet Fabrics) to a blade slot instead of on the blade itself.
• By removing the network and storage identity from the server hardware, customers are now able to upgrade and replace components or the entire server without taking the additional steps of changing the identity on the network, which can be very time consuming especially as IT environments become more virtualized.
• FlexAddress simplifies how IT departments manage their servers and limits any downtime caused by maintenance or upgrading in the datacenter. This empowers administrators by allowing a server change to not affect the network and storage teams while allowing server administrators to rapidly get their job done. It also seamlessly integrates into the existing server and network administrator management infrastructure.

Implementation: A Different Approach

FlexAddress is enabled through the Chassis Management Controller (CMC) of the PowerEdge M1000e, thus it works with all I/O modules (including Cisco,  Brocade, and Dell PowerConnect -- it even works with any pass-through module) and IO Mezzanine cards (including Qlogic, Emulex, and Broadcom).

What makes this different from other blade vendors is that you don’t have to switch your switch. FlexAddress is controlled by the CMC, it doesn’t add a management layer, and seamlessly integrates into the network and server management already used in any datacenter today.

The key takeaway here is the customer can use what they have in place, no need to implement new physical hardware and introduce a new management structure.

The 4 Key Things to Ask: Making an Informed Decision

When I talk to customers, I encourage them to ask us or any other blade provider a couple of questions:

• “What does it take to make this feature work?”
• “What hardware has to be implemented?”
• “Can I manage this feature with the tools I have in place?”
• “How much do all these features cost?”

If you don’t get good answers to the above questions, I’d suggest moving to the next blade vendor. I’d also encourage all the companies out there talking up server blades to simplify how you (and we) explain the value of our respective technologies with clear comparisons and solid facts.

Our customers are telling us that they want less hype and more facts to simplify their decisions.

While you won’t hear us say “blade everything,” you will hear us talk about the virtues of blades and where they make sense for customers. Tom Cloyd and Chad Fenner, who both focus on blade technologies for Dell, chat in this vlog about Dell’s new PowerEdge M805 and PowerEdge M905 server blades.