IT Services

Last week we experienced one of the most significant and exciting launches from Microsoft… the release of Windows 7! As part of the Microsoft Technology Adoption Program (TAP), Dell consultants worked with a number of customers during their testing and implementation of both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

At Betfair – home of the world’s biggest betting community – robust IT is crucial. Staff at the firm process six million transactions every day; that’s more than the combined total of the European stock markets. Security and high availability are paramount, as are energy efficiency and ease of maintenance.

When the IT team replicated a standard workflow across various operating systems, they saw a 20 percent performance increase with Windows 7. This improved performance will boost staff productivity, as well as increase the time the IT team has for value-added work. New features of Windows 7, including BitLocker and AppLocker will improve security. With staff queuing for upgrades, the end-user benefits are clear. Eighty percent of Betfair’s staff in Europe will be using Windows 7 within the next month.

Ian Burgess, Head of Microsoft and Datacentre Platforms, Betfair says: “We have a list of tickets in our support system from people requesting Windows 7. It’s faster, easier to use and has lots of features that produce a more polished, seamless user experience.”

Betfair has also significantly reduced energy consumption. For example, Windows Server 2008 R2 takes advantage of the energy saving features of Dell PowerEdge servers and Intel technology. Hyper-V will also help to achieve efficiency and simplify management. Burgess says: “One of our Hyper-V clusters has four nodes with capacity to spare, whereas before there were seven nodes at full capacity. That equates to a massive energy saving across our datacentres. We’ve achieved this through the combined features of the PowerEdge R610 servers, and Windows Server 2008 R2.”

So whether your main motivation is the safety of your mission critical data, energy efficiency or the time your IT team spends managing your client estate, read on for an idea of how Dell can support you. If you're interested in more information your company's migration to the Windows 7 environment, take a look at IT Expert Voice, where best practices and news related to Windows 7 in the enterprise is discussed.

Dell recently had a big showing in San Francisco for vmworld 2009. We had quite a few of our people out there as my colleague Andrew Gilman wrote about here, showing off our capabilities and making some pretty cool announcements.

From a services perspective, there are some interesting virtualization initiatives underway at Dell as well. Dell ProConsult services help customers dramatically simplify their IT infrastructure, reduce operating costs and freeing up resources for new business initiatives -- especially in the area of virtualization. While virtualization is often seen as a panacea, unless it is planned and managed correctly, it can create more problems than it solves.

In order to help customers streamline and optimize virtualization planning and deployment, Dell will expand use of PlateSpin Recon to provide Virtualization Readiness Assessments and PlateSpin Migrate for Rapid Deployment Services. PlateSpin is the first data center workload profiling, analysis and planning tool to combine consolidation planning with virtual capacity management.

The goal for using these tools is to help save companies OPEX and accelerate the savings through the use of a single Workload Management solution that spans that data center including multiple hypervisors and operating systems, as well as physical and virtual workloads.

It is through these partnerships and expanded services offerings that we continue our vision to simplify our customer's IT infrastructures.

Recently the buzz in the IT industry has been focused on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and the larger concept of “Cloud Computing.” In its most basic form, the concept of SaaS involves a company paying for software as it is used. The software runs on computers someone else owns, and the ongoing maintenance and support of the server infrastructure is handled by that company. It involves essentially leasing the application time for a specific period of time, typically month-to-month. In theory, the value proposition of SaaS is that only paying for computing resources when needed should reduce cost in the long run if an application is used in short spurts.

However, industry analyst firm Gartner recently released the results of a large survey on SaaS implementations still has concerns with broad, cross-enterprise adoption of SaaS. In the study, respondents had some concerns and reservations about specific SaaS solutions.  This suggests that there are some applications where SaaS is a bit ahead of its time. As a Technology Evangelist for Dell’s OEM Group, I don’t see SaaS as a panacea and know there are specific cases where hardware-based appliances should be leveraged or at least strongly considered.

A company needing to deploy a service, application, or IT capability has many options available including SaaS and cloud computing, self-built installations, and an ever-growing selection of appliances. While SaaS is definitely an outstanding choice for many of these applications, it is not for every solution as once imagined. Hardware-based appliances still have a growing role to play and in many instances can overcome many of the challenges that customers like those surveyed by Gartner are experiencing with SaaS.

For example, the third most common issue with SaaS implementations, according to the survey, was reliability and performance to technical specs, something an appliance solution will not have any issues with whatsoever since the solution is designed with dedicated hardware and carefully tested to provide the performance and capabilities for which it was designed. Similarly, the main concern of those surveyed -- functionality for business users -- is addressed with an appliance-based solution since a business need only find the most appropriate appliance for their needs and deploy it in the simple, appliance model (typically a fast and simple installation), and they are up and running with the new solution.

Of course, not every IT service or solution is offered as an appliance, but when they are available, they can be surprisingly simple and effective.

So, what do you think? Are there specific situations where an appliance plays more nicely than SaaS or cloud computing applications?

There are lots of conversations going on in the media about the customer concerns related to upgrading to a Microsoft Windows 7/Server 2008 R2. 

And rightly so, as it is at the top of many customers minds.  However, there are many other ways customers are looking at to better holistically optimize their Microsoft applications and environments.  Recently, Burk Buechler reflected on the conversations that he is having with customers related to their Microsoft environments and how Dell is helping those customers to better holistically optimize them.

Listen as Burk describes how Dell ProConsult provides best practice and in-depth expertise to ensure optimal integration of Microsoft’s core technologies to address customer needs.

If you want to be the first on the block to do live migration using Hyper-V for Windows Server 2008 R2, Dell can help you get there. Dell now offers support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, the newest release in the Windows family of enterprise operating systems. This includes the release of Dell drivers, systems management capability and supporting documents to help you get up and running quickly.

Any software migration can be nerve wracking, so Dell has done the heavy lifting to take the risk out of implementing Windows Server 2008 R2.  

• Our engineers have missed countless dinners, piano recitals and episodes of American Idol while spending thousands of hours of testing and validation to make sure Dell products running Windows Server 2008 R2 are business-ready.
• We have complete driver support for Windows Server 2008 R2 for Dell hardware so you can deploy it, run it and manage easily. You can go here to download drivers.
• You are not in it alone. We offer a comprehensive suite of Dell ProConsult, Dell ProSupport and Dell ProManage services to help you get the most out of your Microsoft environment. In fact, if you already have a Dell ProSupport contract, you have existing support for Windows Server 2008 R2 and for Microsoft Windows 7.

We're ready to help you make the upgrade to R2 today and we will also have Windows Server 2008 R2 factory installed on all available new Dell PowerEdge servers in the third quarter of 2009. You can get the version you want. Dell will offer Standard, Enterprise, Web, Datacenter and Academic editions of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008 Foundation R2, designed for organizations with up to 15 users, on select PowerEdge systems.