Industry

Back in February, I wrote a piece about a survey that Dell had commissioned from the Ponemon Institute regarding laptop security.

Personally, I find these surveys kind of dry and pretty straight-forward. Of course we had to cover our bases to get scientific survey data, but we wanted to get a little more personal and really dig in to find out what people – like you and me – are doing to put data at risk. And when I say risk, I don’t mean just prying eyes, viruses, malware, etc. Data can be destroyed by a careless drop, a latte spilled on the keyboard or as we found … physical violence.

In our study, we asked IT professionals, “What are the most common causes of physical damage to laptops?” Expected answers came back from the IT pros: accidental drops, food and liquid spills or “not protecting the laptop while traveling.”

But the most interesting to me was the fourth option: “Employee inflicted damage because of anger and frustration.”

Let’s take a look at the numbers:

• An astounding 31 percent of Brazilian IT professionals said that the most common cause of physical damage to a laptop is due to frustrated or angry employees;
• A gut-busting 35 percent of Mexican IT professionals reported the same;
• Apparently the French and German IT leaders have it a little better than their Brazilian and Mexican counterparts with 19 percent and 21 percent (respectively) saying that the most common cause of physical damage is due to angry or frustrated employees;
• 13 percent of the U.S. IT contingent we surveyed reported that angry or frustrated employees damage laptops, while the U.K. bested all the countries surveyed with only 6 percent of those polled reporting the same. (I guess the brits are always cool under pressure :)).

I have to admit, I sometimes daydream of throwing my system off the interstate bridge that is near the office. I was quite surprised, however, to see the statistics – they’re staggering.

Maybe we’ve found a new market for our fully rugged Latitude E6400 XFR or the semi-rugged ATG? Seems to me that the premium a customer would pay for a rugged system would work itself out when employees aren’t idle waiting for a replacement laptop or a fix from the IT staff.

There are other results from the survey as well as a video that we shot with the namesake of the Ponemon Institute here.

"HP and IBM should be very afraid - Dell’s latest PowerEdge R610 - featuring Intel's new 'Nehalem' Xeon 5550 - sets new standards for rack server design."

This is the headline I read recently from this week's review of Dell's new Xeon 5500 (Nehalem)-based server by U.K.-based IT Pro. The review, which you can read in it's entirety on their site here, focused on much more than just the processor this system happens to utlise.

"The R610 has a keen eye on virtualisation, but also delivers reduced power demands and vastly improved management features with centralisation high on the agenda. The new servers also have a Lifecycle Controller, which provides features such as recording firmware versions, build level audits and options to transplant the local server’s settings to others.

Stacking up the R610 alongside the lab’s PowerEdge 1950 and you can see the front panel has been completely redesigned. The new LCD display offers a keypad for setting the remote management network address along with views of power consumption and temperatures."

The reviewer, Dave Mitchell, also praises Dell's design efforts with this system and the attention our engineers had in regard to cooling and fan modules. He says, "We were amazed at how quiet the R610 was during testing as we had to turn off most of the other systems in the lab before we could even hear it."

We're obviously quite proud of our 11th generation of PowerEdge servers and hope that our customers are pleased with them as well.

I'd like to invite you to join us for a technical discussion on Tuesday, April 14 at 1pm (central time) for a deep-dive with the engineers that were responsible for these systems. Click over to the Dell Enterprise Tech Center to join us for that discussion.

 Dell has made aggressive strides with the "greenness" of our enterprise products and solutions in an effort to help our customers meet their environmental and cost goals. Our hard work is paying off...

 According to a recent GreenFactor study released by Strategic Oxygen and Cohn & Wolfe, Dell is the number one green technology brand among IT buyers. Strategic Oxygen surveyed more than 3,500 enterprise IT decision makers, including CXOs, CIOs and IT Managers, in 11 different countries. Take a look at Lionel’s Direct2Dell post for a bit more context on the topic.

 While we're happy to see the industry taking notice of our efforts, our work isn’t finished yet. We're still helping customers find their hidden data centers by focusing on IT productivity; we just released new infrastructure products that help reduce IT complexity and cost while improving power and cooling in the data center; and finally, we're working on our next generation of enterprise products and technologies that will continue to set new standards for energy efficiency. Time to get back to work!

Virtualization is undoubtedly a hot topic in the industry, especially today. After much anticipation, Cisco finally announced its “Project California.” As expected, Cisco launched its Unified Computing System (UCS), a blade server appliance designed for virtualization.

There has been a lot of discussion about what this means for Cisco’s partners in the virtualization server market. Are we partners? Are we competitors? Yes and yes. Dell continues to have a strategic networking partnership with Cisco to provide comprehensive solutions to our customers – today’s news does not change this.  Am I worried that Cisco’s new appliance will take away business from Dell? Not at all.

We’ve seen this before. Companies bring to market solutions that address a narrow population of customers or a single IT issue. While Cisco is a leader in the networking space, the server market is a very different ball game. CIOs aren’t looking for proprietary, appliance-like products like UCS because they drive up TCO and create more complexity. This is where Cisco has missed the mark.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the excitement about virtualization that Cisco’s news has generated is great. This is a technology that has revolutionized business computing and I am particularly passionate about it. It seems, however, that Cisco is a bit confused about what customers want and need from virtualization solutions.

When I am talking with customers, there are common themes that come up about what businesses want:

• Options and open standards – Flexibility is key to long term survival in today’s economy and this is what Dell delivers better than anyone else. Companies need more from a supplier than specialized, high-priced solutions. Businesses are looking for the whole package – a technology partner that can help them address and manage their large data sets, edge of the network workloads and everything else.
• Better total cost of ownership – Customers expect that innovation in IT will be focused on lowering the cost of operations WITHOUT significantly raising the price for the hardware.
• Simple management – Customers need the ability to manage their hardware locally. This is not possible with HP’s Virtual Connect –unless you have a 100% HP data center. And it does not appear to be possible with Cisco blades.

Dell’s strategy to simplify IT resonates with CIOs because it helps their organizations reclaim the most valued business resources: people, time and money. You will see exciting news from Dell in the coming months. Soon, we will introduce our totally redesigned Nehalem-based 11^th Generation PowerEdge virtualization servers. And you will also see us expand out partnerships to offer even more options for business looking to build open, flexible and powerful virtualized environments. Stay tuned.

Yesterday, HP announced a refresh to their EVA storage line, which sounds new to those who haven’t been following the evolution of storage solutions over the last few years. For those in the business, it is seen for what it is: an attempt to catch up to what Dell and others have been doing for some time now. It is an attempt because, while the “new” EVA arrays have added some additional features – some that Dell has had for almost three years – they are still noticeably missing many that customers are looking for to help solve their storage problems and simplify their IT.

Catch up:

• 4Gbit back-end – Dell/EMC has 2 generations and almost 3 years of experience with end-to-end FC4 support;
• Support for flash drives – Dell/EMC arrays have supported for more than 6 months;
• Support for RAID 6 – Dell/EMC added RAID 6 support on CX3 arrays – the previous generation.

Still not there:

• Increased capacity, ports and cache that doesn’t approach the levels available on Dell/EMC arrays: 960 drives, 32 ports, 32GB cache;
• No ability to add additional ports or new network technologies like FC8 and 10Gbit iSCSI to an existing array;
• No native support for iSCSI – only through an expensive FC-to-iSCSI bridge;
• No data-in-place upgrades from previous generations of arrays;
• No native thin-provisioning ability like what is available on Dell/EMC and Dell EqualLogic arrays;
• No support for low-power SATA;
• No announced support for drive spin down. 

In today’s environment, features that save money or extend a product’s useful life are essential. Dell includes them because we listen to customers who tell us how they need to extend the life of their storage, consolidate it on intelligent SAN platforms and manage it more easily as their businesses grow and evolve. This is revolutionary and dynamic. We have been consistent in our approach since the beginning that we will continue to drive customer-centric innovation and make storage simple, capable and affordable. In the dynamic data center, Dell’s storage products will continue to help our customers grow.

We’ll also look forward to giving HP more targets to shoot for as they plan out their next generation of storage products a few years from now.