IT Services

One of the customers that participated in yesterdays' press briefing with Dell and VMware was Frederick Memorial Healthcare (FMH), which began providing health services to Maryland residents over 100 years ago.

As the hospital is entering its second century in an expanded facility, Roy Turner, FMH's server systems engineer, explains how the healthcare provider's use of technology is key to delivering top-quality care to its patients. For example, FMH is one of the few hospitals in its area with a wireless infrastructure throughout the facility to make information and communication instantly available to care providers.

Dell has helped FMH with IT projects in the past, and the customer trusted the Dell's advice when we recommended VMware as the leading virtualization technology.

Dell ProConsult Services performed the hospital’s initial data center virtualization implementation using VMware ESX 3.5 and VMware Virtual Center 2.5. Dell helped the IT team deploy 106 virtual servers on six new Dell PowerEdge R900 servers.

FMH asked Dell to help it upgrade to VMware vSphere 4 and the VMware vCenter Server. The Dell Services team worked hard to ensure FMH’s VMware vSphere 4 project was a success, and helped set up an initial environment and test the upgrade path FMH would use for its production environment. Roy and the server engineering team have virtualized over 100 servers, with 75 being converted from physical to virtual, reducing power consumption and cooling in the data center.

Roy spent a little bit of time with us explaining their challenges and how they worked with Dell and VMware.

This week, Reuters columnist Eric Auchard, penned an opinion piece on the future of Dell and what role virtualization will play in that.

In the blog post, Auchard says "More than other large computer vendors, it [Dell] has embraced "virtualization" technology that lets many big tasks run on the same machine rather than separate ones.

We indeed have been very focused on enabling our customers to virtualize their data centers as evidenced by recent announcements. But, not only are we talking about this with our customers, but we're also eating our own dog food. We have virtualized a significant percentage of our data centers and have seen dramatic savings - in the neighborhood of US $29 million.

Take a look at the video below, which features Buddy Holtendorf from Dell's Global Platform Services team in Dell IT. Buddy describes Dell's "virtual first" methodology in which every new deployment is looked at through a virtualization lens. Dell's internal infrastructure has about 5,800 virtual machines on the guest side with about 500 hosts. If you're interested in more details on what Dell has done, take a look at this case study.

On this same topic, Gartner earlier this year wrote an in-depth report entitled "The Great Virtualization Dilemma of the Next Decade: What You Need to Know" that outlines some of the challenges and strategic issues that IT personnel face. The report gives specific advice on how to deal with issues such as heterogeneity, resource and performance optimization, and the increasingly fragmented tool market. Take a minute to download this report and give it a read.

Well, soon anyway. Microsoft has said that they will RTM (release to manufacturer) gold code to the market by the end of this month. There are several folks talking about Windows 7 (Win7), so I won't go too deep into the OS itself. Brandon and team at Microsoft have done a great job of chronicling the developments and features of Windows.

I will say however, that I have been running the Win7 release candidate on my home computer and can tell you that it is rocks! It's fast, nimble, stable, etc. Our engineering and development teams have been working really closely with Microsoft to get the OS ready. We're already working with early adopter customers to deploy Win7 and their feedback is overwhelmingly positive. I'm happy to report that I've have been accepted into Dell's Win7 early adopter program and can't wait to get it on my machine!

What we find interesting about our commercial customers is that 86 percent of commercial customers are still using XP, according to Forrester. This presents a unique challenge for IT departments as XP is now 8 years old and customers are looking at a “skip-generation” upgrade to Windows 7 (read: clean wipe of the hard drive).

The first step in any software deployment is planning. As with any software deployment it is important to look at application compatibility. Customers must be able to understand what is compatible, what isn’t and how they remediate? Do they keep low-use applications? Will the way they package their applications be compatible with the OS? These are all questions customers need to understand the answers to. We can help them with our global Application Compatibility Factory that will help them get to the answers they need.

From there we help them assess, design and implement their deployments.   Rather than throwing a bunch of suits at the problem, Dell ProConsult services offerings utilize electronic discovery, Web based surveys, best practices, comparative data, reference architectures and logic to offer customers shorter, more impactful consulting engagements. 

We're pumped about Win7 - I haven't run into a single person within Dell that isn't. It's now time for us to get to work and help our customers make the transition.

With more than 95 percent of federal agencies using Dell systems, it was no surprise for us that Symantec’s annual Government Symposium conference participants were keen on discussing their IT and Security business challenges. The symposium provided a forum to listen to public sector customer’s requirements, experiences and solutions.

During the E-Records Management/E-Discovery session, I moderated, there was a lot of interest around how government agencies “get started” when the problem requires collaboration around IT, RIM and legal expertise.  Approaches varied, but one consistent theme was that either as a distinct organization or as a formal cross functional team, you needed to have equal involvement and buy-in from these three domains in order to have an effective program for RIM and E-Discovery.  The panelists (representing United States Postal Service, Department of Justice, Department of Interior and Government Accountability Office) also tackled interesting questions about the responsibility for record and information management in the Web 2.0 world.  In short, participants recognized that as government expands use of social media (see Open Government Initiative) to reach citizens (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc.), cross-functional collaboration, decision on what the business/mission needs your solving for and a defined policy for managing it are the main ingredients for a successful program.

Cybersecurity was also a key topic of discussion with a standing room only panel session hosted by Joe Ayers, Dell Federal, Area VP, on Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative. Morning and lunchtime keynotes from Virginia Senator Mark Warner and Senior Director of Cyberspace Melissa Hathaway, respectively, also offered valuable commentaries on the challenges facing government, the role IT can play and the need for collaboration between the private sector and the public sector.  Melissa’s discussion about the Administration’s recently completed Cyberspace Security review laid out the challenges we face and recommendations for action and sounded the call for better public/private partnership models to protect and secure our critical internet infrastructure.  Her past activity and the emphasis the new Administration is placing here were clearly evident by the pervasive nature of security discussions in presentations and in IT industry exhibits.  Protecting client side computing is one step, but the overall cyber security challenge requires a comprehensive approach – an approach Dell looks at from an end-to-end process from the supply chain to the data on the laptop.  One concrete step identified during Melissa presentation and picked up in the media is the creation of a national cyber security incident response plan.

Again, no surprises from the conference, however, we’ll continue to partner on the dialog and collaboration needed for progress in addressing our Public sector’s customer’s IT challenges.

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.