Industry

This week, at the Cisco Networkers event in Barcelona, we announced our OEM expanded partnership with Cisco.

Instead of boring you with the details of the agreement and bombarding you with acronyms like LAN, SAN, FCoE and iSCSI – let me cut to the chase.

Why does this matter?

IT needs to be more closely coordinated than ever before. With IT efficiency tied so closely to business performance, the server, storage and networking folks can no longer operate in silos – they are one team with a common goal of meeting the ever-changing needs of their internal and external customers. By offering additional Cisco solutions that complement Dell server and storage solutions, businesses have a fully coordinated network fabric to gracefully adapt to changing business and application needs.

Businesses need maximum value for every IT dollar spent. Dell offers the most value for your IT dollar – hands down. Dell will continue to deliver tremendous value to businesses looking to unify their virtualized server and storage environments with this expanded Cisco relationship. We are not only reducing CAPEX with the combined solution, but also reducing OPEX by cutting management costs.

Complexity is the last thing that our customers need. Dell works within our customers existing environments rather than force additional management tools, training, integration into security teams, and support/service processes.  The Cisco switches are easily integrated into our customers’ environments. By continuously talking to our customers, we know many of our customers already use Cisco equipment and their associated management tools. By partnering with Cisco, we allow you to use your existing network management tools.

Options matter. Dell is an open standards and non-proprietary based data center solution provider. So, we are committed to helping our customers simplify IT by providing great data center products and solutions, including networking switches from leading vendors. Partnerships mean more options for Dell to build IT environments that meet customers’ individual needs. Along with these options comes the flexibility to deploy various protocols across a single, unified, data center fabric – Ethernet.

Single Server Adapter. Virtualized server environments can often have mixed I/O, such as Ethernet, Fibre Channel and Infiniband (translation: a lot of server adapters). The new Cisco switches can help decrease the number of server adapters required to build a fully-virtualized server environment. Reducing server adapters reduces cabling, improves air flow and reduces overall power consumption.

OK, if you know me I can’t completely skip the details (hey, but at least I waited this long). Here it is quick and dirty. We expanded our solution technology integrator agreement with Cisco and are reselling the Cisco Nexus 5020 Switch with Dell PowerEdge servers. We have also qualified the Catalyst 4948 and 3750 Top-of-Rack Switches (ToR) switches for our EqualLogic™ Storage products. We’re happy to have a comprehensive portfolio of IT products and services to help companies simplify their data centers.

More information can be found on www.dell.com/ciscosolutions.

I can’t get enough of MythBusters on the Discovery Channel. Adam and Jamie have quite possibly the best jobs on the planet and I fancy myself an aspiring MythBuster.

Today, when I was catching up on my reading (I know, I’m a bit behind), my MythBuster alarm went off. I was going through IBM’s earnings transcript and was struck by a comment that was made on slide 23. IBM seems to assert that more businesses are now moving from x86 servers to RISC servers.

I’m not buying it. And I have good reason to believe that customers aren’t either, nor are industry analysts, nor is at least one reporter and even one IBM’s own execs admits they’ve got some issues to resolve.

First, if you look at the most recent IDC server tracker data – x86 server unit shipments grew in the third quarter, as did revenue and shipments for blade servers. UNIX server (the category where IBM’s RISC servers reside) revenue and shipments, on the other hand, continued to decline. This shows that more businesses (and Dell’s customers, for that matter) are moving from RISC to x86, not the other way around. This seems only logical to me, especially in challenging economic environments.

Second, Timothy Prickett-Morgan over at The Register is skeptical about IBM's assertion as well. He says,

“Not so fast there. IBM's drop off in sales in these two areas might mean that IBM's competitive position in x64 servers and storage is bad. Or it might mean x64 customers are waiting to see the forthcoming "Nehalem" servers from Intel before committing to purchasing. It might mean that IBM stuffed its channel in Q2 and Q3 with x64 and storage gear and its partners just couldn't eat any more with the year ending as miserably for them as it most assuredly did.

Or it might mean the virtualization downdraft is hitting IBM's x64 server sales, since IBM has always sold relatively heavy x86 and x64 boxes to big enterprises. You would expect IBM to take the economic hit first when virtualization really took hold, reducing footprints both in the data center and sold each quarter. Mainframe and Power servers are already virtualized and have already seen the virtualization crunch.”

And finally, I might be inclined to believe Robert Moffat, IBM SVP and Group Executive, Systems & Technology Group, who told CRN back in December that IBM “screwed up” the execution of their System X business, while rebutting some claims from HP’s CEO Mark Hurd comments on server market share.

So in my estimation, I call this claim BUSTED!

This post comes to us from Emma Ferns of Dell's EMEA Team:

Are you being asked to do more with less now and in the New Year? Dell’s enterprise and services team recently held an Enterprise Technology and Services ‘Vision Day’ at Chelsea Football Club’s Stamford Bridge Stadium in London, and discussed with a pan-EMEA audience ways that we can work together with our customers in the current economic environment.

In a packed programme Rick Becker, VP Blade and Solutions, John Joseph, VP Storage Marketing and Dolph Westerbos, VP Services and Solutions EMEA, talked about our vision for this marketplace and most importantly about working with customers to focus their technology investment priorities in the economic downturn we are experiencing.  In short we are helping customer by simplifying IT, reducing costs and maximizing productivity.

In the video below Rick Becker speaks at length about Dell’s own experiences in the data center that have enabled us to ‘compute more and consume less’, and critically provided us with learnings to share with large organizations when advising them on the next steps they could take.  Rather than sacrificing innovation and the latest technology in favor of short-term budget relief, you can make smart investments in your IT infrastructure.  Though counter-intuitive, instead of taking the obvious strategy of protecting your application space at the expense of infrastructure, you need to do exactly the opposite.

Take a look!

The year 2008 is quickly coming to a close and there are many in the industry who are making predictions for 2009. While we’re not inclined to try to predict what’s going to happen next year, we do have some very smart people that have their eyes set on the trends that are impacting us as a company as well as our customers.

One such person is our own Dr. Albert Esser, vice president in Dell’s Data Center Infrastructure Group who is focused on energy issues related to customer’s data centers.

I sat down with Albert recently to ask him about trends specific to the data center and he outlined five major issues for you to consider. Two of the trends he urges customers to keep watch of are virtualization and energy-efficiency as it relates to the data center, which were also mentioned in a list recently put out by Baseline Magazine in its top 11 trends for IT list. Their list includes issues that go far beyond the data center but are still of relevance for CIOs.

Let’s hear what Albert has to say.

One of the primary ways to simplify IT infrastructure – and save in the process – is through server consolidation. Blade technology is a good way to approach this, but many IT managers are reluctant to take the blade route. There are several myths about blades that create the impression that blades aren’t the best choice for consolidation. In a recent E-Guide on Blade Server Trends sponsored by Dell and Intel, virtualization expert Barb Goldworm attacked these myths.

Her comments are worth reading:

Because blade systems require an up-front purchase of a blade chassis, one misconception is that blades are a more expensive solution than rack servers. In fact, if you are only implementing one or two servers in a single location, this is true. However, if you are implementing four, five or more servers, the total cost per server can actually be lower, because of the shared components within the blade chassis. Just calculating the numbers on hardware alone (without counting other savings such as power, cabling, and management), the costs for a blade server can be lower than a comparable rack server.

One blade customer did a very basic comparison using Dell blades, calculating the cost per server based on the blade cost plus 1/10 of the chassis cost. He estimates the blades saved him 20% over comparable rack servers. While these numbers vary by vendor and configuration, the bottom line is that unless the chassis is mostly empty, blades cost less.

Stay tuned to the blog next week for myth #2.