Equallogic

You might think that after two full days of keynotes, breakout sessions, events and meetings at Oracle OpenWorld it would be hard to excite a convention hall full of business and IT leaders, but Michael Dell had just the right formula with:

• A compelling vision - Redirect IT dollars from management and maintenance to innovation and improving the business by building an Efficient Enterprise;
• Big commitments for quantifiable results like working to take $200 billion of inefficiency out of the $1.2 trillion IT infrastructure industry spend and driving $200 million in savings for Dell's own IT;
• Impressive statistics, something almost all of us in the IT industry get into, of the power of the Dell and Oracle partnership and Dell's leadership and track record in providing solutions;
• Cool products, including:
  • Dell's 11th generation of PowerEdge servers were onstage and Michael highlighted the enhancements in these new servers to simplify deployment, enhance performance, reduce complexity and lower power and cooling requirements;
  • He also discussed more innovation to come next year with new PowerEdge servers based on Intel Nehalem EX architecture; and,
  • Talked about continued enhancements to the EqualLogic storage products, like SSD (launched this year) and 10Gbps Ethernet (coming soon) that will drive efficiency and performance for storage.
• A blueprint to make this vision a reality including:
  • Standardization on open standard solutions built on x86-based servers;
  • Simplification by starting with the applications and taking the complexity out of the way they are supported and managed, and by using Virtualization and Storage Consolidation;
  • Automation by streamlining Services delivery and enabling self-service IT models where critical business services can be deployed through the cloud.
• Dell's own plan - Robin Johnson, CIO of Dell, shared how he is driving inefficiency out of the Dell IT machine
• Having fun - Everyone was excited by Larry Ellison's surprise appearance and from the return of the Tech Force alliance!

Hopefully you are as excited as we are about building the Efficient Enterprise, and if you’re here this week, be sure to come see us in the booth. 

You can follow us on Twitter @dellatORACLEwld and check out my earlier post on Direct2Dell with details of all our activities.

I won't cover it all here but be sure to click over to our blogging mothership, Direct2Dell, to read about Dell's Fast Track to Efficiency, the theme for Dell's announcement of a slew of new servers, a cool new EqualLogic array for small business and remote offices, and quite a few different services.

We'll also be hosting a webcast today with a number of Dell executives outlining the importance of these announcements and the impact to our customers. Following that webcast, my colleagues at Dell TechCenter will be hosting a live technical chat.

Take a look.

Today, VMware announced its new vSphere 4 platform at an event in Palo Alto. Michael Dell joined VMware CEO Paul Maritz on stage, along with other industry luminaries including EMC’s Joe Tucci, Cisco’s John Chambers and Intel’s Pat Gelsinger, to participate in the announcement of the industry’s first cloud operating system.

With vSphere, VMware aims to simplify cloud infrastructure with IT services for both internal and external clouds. What made this an interesting announcement was the recognition for the hard work of their own engineering community (who sat all in blue t-shirts on the lawn) and the collaboration they have had with others in the industry.

For our part, Dell worked extensively with VMware throughout the development of vSphere with comprehensive testing and compatibility processes. Dell customers were also part of the vSphere Beta Customer Program, and we received rave reviews from the pre-release vSphere code testing. Together with VMware, Dell is making virtualized infrastructures faster to implement and manage.

Our new EqualLogic PS6000 series SAN is vSphere- and vStorage-ready out of the box. Our new 11^th generation of PowerEdge servers with vSphere 4.0 deliver up to 168 percent faster performance and are up to 135 percent more energy efficient. Not only does Dell partner with VMware to solve customer problems – we are the number one reseller of VMware—but we are also a customer with one of the largest VMware installations in the world.

During the event, Michael brought to sharp focus the issue of enterprise IT waste. For every $1 spent on acquiring new technology, customers typically spend $8 managing it. This waste is magnified by poor server utilization, power consumption and ever-increasing consulting dollars to manage the infrastructure. According to Michael, virtualization will not only drive the next wave of innovation but new efficiencies as well, from the desktop to the data center, and into the cloud.

Michael went on to discuss how customers are looking for a cloud platform or deployment environment that is open, is interoperable, runs on industry standards and is virtualized. Dell works with the largest cloud providers in the world and has built more than 19 cloud-optimized platforms. If there’s one thing we learned by working with these leading cloud providers, it’s that variation kills. vSphere provides a common, homogenized environment that enables cloud providers to utilize economies of scale, accelerating the delivery of business services.

He also discussed how the future of cloud computing will be both on- and off-premise. This is where VMware’s vSphere comes in as a key enabler. VMware’s vision is to create a homogenous environment where customer workloads can be hosted behind their own firewall or with a service provider, all managed under a single context. In this way, these customers can achieve new levels of operational efficiencies. Enterprise computing is at a tipping point driven by cloud computing and virtualization and Dell is committed to shifting customers into the new era of IT efficiency. Together with VMware we will make virtualized infrastructures faster to implement and to manage. We are laying the foundation for a more efficient enterprise running from the desktop to the cloud.

The big takeaway is that today marks a new landmark in Dell’s partnership with VMware as we will expand our vision to embrace the cloud computing, and fully address one of the most pressing issues facing companies and organizations of all kinds and sizes – the efficiency of enterprise IT. I’d love to hear from any of you who were also in the audience on your take on the launch today.

With declining memory prices and increasing application performance requirements, Solid State Drive technology has re-emerged as a topic of great interest in the IT industry.  Most recently, enterprise-class versions of the technology have been appearing in midrange storage arrays, including the Dell|EMC Clariion CX series and Dell's EqualLogic PS Series. 

We had Travis Vigil in Dell’s Enterprise Product Group spend a little time to explain the basics around Solid State Drives and how they are being used in the new EqualLogic PS6000S array. 

In the video, Travis references some tests the Dell Storage and Oracle Solutions teams did to show how the addition of a PS6000S array could improve transactional throughput or response time. 

More details on those tests can be found in this white paper entitled "Benefits and Best Practices for Deploying SSDs in an OLTP Environment Using Dell EqualLogic PS Series."

Enjoy.

Have you seen the latest?  Storage Magazine ranked Dell the #1 midrange array provider in service and reliability.  With our acquisition of EqualLogic, we turned last-year’s 9^th place ranking into a #1 ranking in product reliability and initial product quality.  Hopefully, you didn’t miss Dell’s other recent achievement where Gartner recognized Dell as a leader in Midrange Disk Arrays for their Magic Quadrant 2008.

Dell has made a tradition out of listening to you, our customers.  In turn, you’ve rewarded us with your support.  We’re excited to be plugged in, so we can keep building storage solutions you want.

Thanks for all of your feedback.