SAN

You might think that after two full days of keynotes, breakout sessions, events and meetings at Oracle OpenWorld it would be hard to excite a convention hall full of business and IT leaders, but Michael Dell had just the right formula with:

• A compelling vision - Redirect IT dollars from management and maintenance to innovation and improving the business by building an Efficient Enterprise;
• Big commitments for quantifiable results like working to take $200 billion of inefficiency out of the $1.2 trillion IT infrastructure industry spend and driving $200 million in savings for Dell's own IT;
• Impressive statistics, something almost all of us in the IT industry get into, of the power of the Dell and Oracle partnership and Dell's leadership and track record in providing solutions;
• Cool products, including:
  • Dell's 11th generation of PowerEdge servers were onstage and Michael highlighted the enhancements in these new servers to simplify deployment, enhance performance, reduce complexity and lower power and cooling requirements;
  • He also discussed more innovation to come next year with new PowerEdge servers based on Intel Nehalem EX architecture; and,
  • Talked about continued enhancements to the EqualLogic storage products, like SSD (launched this year) and 10Gbps Ethernet (coming soon) that will drive efficiency and performance for storage.
• A blueprint to make this vision a reality including:
  • Standardization on open standard solutions built on x86-based servers;
  • Simplification by starting with the applications and taking the complexity out of the way they are supported and managed, and by using Virtualization and Storage Consolidation;
  • Automation by streamlining Services delivery and enabling self-service IT models where critical business services can be deployed through the cloud.
• Dell's own plan - Robin Johnson, CIO of Dell, shared how he is driving inefficiency out of the Dell IT machine
• Having fun - Everyone was excited by Larry Ellison's surprise appearance and from the return of the Tech Force alliance!

Hopefully you are as excited as we are about building the Efficient Enterprise, and if you’re here this week, be sure to come see us in the booth. 

You can follow us on Twitter @dellatORACLEwld and check out my earlier post on Direct2Dell with details of all our activities.

Last week we announced our Efficient Enterprise portfolio of integrated products and services. This week we are revealing the details of our five new blade, rack and tower 11^th generation Dell PowerEdge servers that are now available. These new servers were officially debuted at the Intel Xeon 5500 series processor launch event this afternoon in Santa Clara, California, and Intel’s Boyd Davis wrote about it earlier today on Direct2Dell.

Despite economic challenges, many companies and organizations want to take advantage of the significant performance increases paired with the cost savings from energy efficient technologies and virtualization. The majority of data centers were built during the dot-com boom and are reaching their 10-year lifespan, so it’s no surprise that many companies are in need of a refresh. Dell designed its new servers with input from hundreds of IT pros worldwide with a theme in mind: do more with less. The new server portfolio does that by simplifying data center operations, improving performance and energy efficiency, and lowering total cost of ownership.

Before we take a look under the hood, let’s check out the sleek design. Not only do these new servers look cool enough to be in Bruce Wayne’s lair in Batman “The Dark Knight,” but they have also won 2009 iF Germany Product Design Awards. It’s not just about good looks. The new servers have system and image commonality across platforms with logical layout of components and power supply placement allows for straight forward installation and redeployment.

What’s New Inside?

• Simplify with the Industry’s First Embedded Systems Management: Dell put a lot of the systems management media you need for deployment, diagnostics, update, and configuration right on the motherboard. Unified Server Configurator powered by LifeCycle Controller radically simplifies IT processes so you can deploy operating systems 43 percent faster.
• Save with Industry Leading Energy Efficiency: Energy Smart technologies in the new servers cut power usage while cranking up performance capacity. We expect Dell PowerEdge 11^th generation servers to have the industry’s highest performance per watt, according to SPECpower_ssj2008 results to be published later today.
• Do More with Leading Virtualization Performance: In addition to the new Intel Xeon 5500 series processors, the PowerEdge servers have embedded hypervisors from VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, up to 125 percent increased memory footprint and more integrated I/O. All of that emphasis on virtualization paid off. Dell PowerEdge R710 achieved the industry’s highest VMmark score for 2U servers, topping all 2- and 4-socket platforms in virtualization performance.
• More Horsepower to Do More: the new servers provide up to 50 percent more performance over previous generation servers to run those massive databases and applications more efficiently. According to SPECjbb2005 Dell PowerEdge servers lead the industry in performance.

We’re excited by this major refresh of our server portfolio and by what it can do to advance IT for our customers. If you want the details on how you can do more with less in your data center with the new 11^th Generation Dell PowerEdge servers, check out our benchmarks.

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.

Storage area networks (SANs) have greatly simplified the management of storage resources. By creating a centralized storage pool that can be allocated as needed, SANs have enabled many organizations to reduce both management and capital costs. Now, an approach has emerged to take SANs to the next level, with further simplification and savings. It's called thin provisioning.

Thin provisioning helps IT departments attack the fundamental problem of storage under-utilization. In many businesses, a significant portion of purchased storage is not in active use, although it is kept constantly available -- taking up real estate in the data center, consuming power, and increasing the load on data center cooling equipment. In addition to wasting opex dollars, there is a capex penalty to this approach. By buying storage capacity "too soon," IT organizations fail to benefit from the constantly falling cost per GB that each new generation of storage technology provides.

In essence, thin provisioning changes the process of allocating space on a SAN so that physical storage resources are only committed to a volume when data is actually written to it, eliminating significant waste.

Currently, to allocate space on a SAN, an IT administrator defines a logical volume and makes it available to a server. The SAN controller then responds by reserving physical space on the array of disk drives that it manages. Every byte of storage determined by the volume size is backed up with a physical location, whether it is used or not.

With this approach, unused space is effectively wasted, because it cannot be reclaimed for other volumes or applications. With thin provisioning, this space is available, because each volume claims physical resources only when needed. Furthermore, the allocation process is automated, so that administrators don't have to spend extra time.

The net result is that IT organizations can come much closer to the goal of purchasing storage when it's actually needed, while reducing the complexity of the administration process.

You can find more detail in my recently published article in Dell Power Solutions.

If you’re looking for ways to simplify and save in the data center – or even “server closet,” one of the most important strategies available to you is server virtualization.

When you migrate several applications running on several different servers onto a single server, you save. For starters, you see a substantial reduction in energy costs because you’re powering fewer servers. Equally important, you’re also cooling fewer servers. And you have fewer servers to physically maintain, which means fewer maintenance hours for the technicians who maintain them.

This all adds up to OpEx savings that can be as high as 25 percent. And when a new replacement cycle comes up, you won’t need to purchase as many servers. This will let you actually lower your CapEx budget. As times get better, you’ll have more funds available to allocate to other projects. Regardless of the economic situation, virtualization is a smart strategy for any business with five servers or more.

The savings benefits of server virtualization are indisputable. But does virtualization really simplify your operations?

A few years ago, the answer might have been in doubt. But with today’s mature virtualization technology, the answer is definitely yes. To give just one example, virtualization streamlines application development and platform certification, because with virtualization there’s a single, common virtual interface, and there’s no need to deal with multiple hardware implementations or generations.

At Dell, we provide all the resources you need to make virtualization a cost-saving reality for your business, from workshops and assessments to design, implementation and support. If you’re interested in learning more, a good place to start is our white paper, Server Virtualization in the Scalable Enterprise. For details about the services we offer, check out our Virtualization Services brochure, which has links to even more resources. You can also visit these previous posts.