Networking

In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot of planning going on around Dell lately. We’ve come to you before and talked about our upcoming Virtual-Ready Infrastructure (VRI) and how the Scalent relationship fits into that. However, we haven’t yet given you a ton of details on the networking piece. Yeah, ok – we told you how we’re expanding our Brocade partnership, but there’s even more.

We’re now adding Juniper to round out the end-to-end 10GbE story. Both the new Brocade and Juniper networking products will become part of our existing PowerConnect brand and will extend that brand into areas like WAN, security and data-center Ethernet switching.

The Dell team has worked hard to bring choice to our customers. This announcement is more proof of that.

Dig into the video below where Larry Hart talks more details on the Juniper partnership, how it will play with our other products, and what it means for our relationship with Cisco.

I never feel like I get enough sleep … fighting to get six to seven solid hours in every night. However, my stresses are NOTHING compared to the noise and pressure IT admins, CIOs and CTOs deal with. Just look at our industry. From what I’ve read and learned so far, it seems Cisco and HP want customers to rip out their current hardware, software and solutions, and start “fresh” with their Unified Computing System (UCS) and BladeSystem Matrix offerings. Correct me if I’m wrong about that, but I still have to ask -- what’s their motivation? Think about it, why would they insist on something so disruptive especially in a time when customers are fighting to thrive with restricted budgets?

The bottom line in my opinion is this: locking your company into an infrastructure means a locked-in revenue stream for the provider and lack of choice and flexibility for you.

This is incredibly frustrating. It shouldn’t be novel to do the right thing for customer FIRST and make money second. Folks are dealing with legacy hardware and limited budgets (in most cases) with an intense desire to virtualize and do something called “the cloud,” whatever that means to them. That’s enough to digest without having to consider that everything they’ve done up to this point might have been a waste of time and money.

Dell thinks there’s another way, a way where you don’t have to eat your own young to thrive and stay competitive.

First, we’re open. We’ve figured out how to get you where you’re going, specifically with virtualization, using most of what you’ve already invested in.

Second, we’re pragmatic. (pause for smirk on overused marketing word) We give you answers to IT problems now, today, just in case you don’t feel like waiting on promises that no one has proven or deployed.

Finally, we’re end-to-end. We already offer first class products at each step of the fully virtualized solution, including servers, storage, networking, desktop and the cloud, instead of specializing in only one part of the data center and trying our hand at new businesses.

This week at VMworld, we announced two new partnerships that strengthen our open, pragmatic and end-to-end approach. Brocade expands its 10-year relationship with the Dell family to provide enhanced leadership of next-generation data center networking with 10/40/100GbE, Security, iSCSI, FCoE and Converged Enhanced DCB Ethernet. These are in addition to our Brocade FC switches.

But we’re covering more than just the networking side of investment protection. We’re also partnering with Scalent Systems to make heterogeneous, virtualized environments portable for easier disaster recovery and higher availability. Now, you’ll no longer have to redefine your physical storage and network connections each time you need to move whole hypervisors, physical applications, workloads or virtual machines (VM). All of this can be done NOW with your existing technologies and future flexibility to purchase and use what you need to customize your infrastructure.

This is just the beginning. Folks like The Register, eWeek and ChannelWeb are already talking, and we’ll hit the streets a few times this fall with more info. In the meantime, ask some hard questions. The next time you find yourself sitting in the big, leather chair being entertained by the “latest and greatest” buzz solution, make sure it doesn’t end up stinging you.

Virtualization has become a fully mainstream idea, talked about in circles from the IT admin all the way up to the CEO’s office, but there are still a lot of people out there that I talk to that just have their toes in the water, or are waiting to start or to expand their virtualization efforts.

If you aren’t fully tuned into this concept, virtualization can provide many benefits to organizations for increasing availability, enhancing disaster recovery, reducing costs around equipment and management, and more.  A key component to getting the most out of virtual server deployments is utilizing shared storage like a storage area network or SAN.

Just like consolidating your servers, consolidating your storage on a SAN can help enable better availability and data protection as well as helping reduce management costs.  We have made it one of our goals to simplify and accelerate your virtualization deployments by providing information, products and services to help our customers understand, scope, deploy and get the most out of their virtualization efforts.

We’re doing it again today by announcing enhancements to our CX4 storage arrays and networking products, like a high port count 1GbE blade switch, a 10GbE blade pass through I/O module, a 10GbE blade mezzanine card and 1GbE quad port blade mezzanine cards, and services that better enable consolidation and virtualization.

Our Dell/EMC CX4 storage arrays now support 10Gbit iSCSI (10GbE), along with the already supported 1Gbit iSCSI, 4Gbit Fibre Channel, and 8Gbit Fibre Channel, all on one array.  The additional bandwidth from 10GbE can enable support for more virtual machines and reduce the number of connections needed from server to storage.  The CX4 has also been enhanced with Virtualization Aware Navisphere, a feature that simplifies storage in virtual environments through automatic discovery of virtual machines and VMware ESX servers, end-to-end virtual-to-physical machine mapping, and advanced search for instant virtual machine discovery.

All this is happening at a great time as we are getting geared up for vmworld next week in San Francisco. You can check out my upcoming booth theatre presentation on the new CX4 capabilities by clicking here.

We hope that if you are there, you’ll participate in some of the many things we have planned to help better inform and educate you on virtualization options.

If you’re not, you can follow @Dellatvmworld on Twitter or check out Dell’s Virtual Tradeshow Booth. Also tune in for Andrew Gilman’s blog this week on all the things we’ll be doing at the show, including live technical demonstrations and in-booth white boarding sessions with our experts that can help you take the next step to improve and simplify your IT.

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.

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.