Server

Remember Michael Dell talking at Oracle OpenWorld about Dell’s plan to reduce IT infrastructure spend by $200 billion? That doesn’t happen by making pretty PowerPoint. The team here in Round Rock has a rock-solid plan to bring Virtual-Ready Infrastructure (VRI) to life and soon.

So, what’s in it for customers … the folks actually struggling with hundreds of unique tools, scores of unique skill sets and dozens of unique processes. The ultimate goal of Dell’s VRI is to reduce customers IT spend through the use of fewer tools, fewer tasks and optimized IT delivery.

Paul Prince, Dell’s CTO, Enterprise Product Group, explains our VRI investment in the clip below.

The unified resource manager Paul mentions is a solution from Scalent Systems, a partnership we announced during VMworld this year.

It will allow you to dynamically manage your servers, storage and networking and allows one of the biggest resource savings:

• Rack once, cable once – modify workloads without touching the physical infrastructure
• Works with existing hardware
• Incorporates both physical and virtual workloads
• Doesn’t effect in-band server performance

We’re excited about what’s evolving, so please stay tuned. We’ll definitely be back to share more information on how this and the rest of VRI will come to life for you.

Jimmy Pike is the director of systems architecture for the Data Center Solutions group here at Dell and self-proclaimed “head geek.”   Using a tool case with its insides stripped out, part of an old inbox and a bunch of off the shelf components he has created the world’s first portable “data center.”   (All for the princely sum of ~$2,000)

This former toolkit now holds:

• Two dual-socket servers featuring 2.5GHz Intel processors
• One server running Windows ‘03 acting as the DHCP and domain server and the other running Red Hat linux.
• 2 x 1TB SATA drives for each of the servers
• 32GB of memory
• A single central power supply
• A 5-port Gigabit Ethernet switch
• 2 x 500GB scratch discs

and a whole bunch more…

Extra credit reading:

GigaOm – Exclusive: Dell Shows Off a Data Center — In a Briefcase!

Pau for now…

Much like the game my kids have always loved, Where's Waldo, on a daily basis we get the pleasure of trying to keep track of our newest colleague, Barton George, Dell's cloud evangelist.

He spent some time at OpenSource World/CloudWorld/Next Generation Data Center, which previously went by a much simpler name of LinuxWorld, and appears to have interviewed the entire left side of the menu (read: reference to Steve Guttenberg in the 1982 film Diner). He's posted those interviews on his blog and many of them here on Inside Enterprise IT (including Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth, Egenera's Ken Oestrich, Right Scale's Michael Crandell, GoGrid's John Keagy and Reductive Labs' Luke Kanies, among many others).

Well, the tables were turned on Barton recently and Michael Cote of RedMonk spent some time talking to Barton for their IT Management & Cloud Podcast.

They discussed a broad range of topics, including:

• Swinging of dead cats;
• Dell's cloud strategy and Dell's Data Center Solutions group;
• Dell's desire to expand these efforts to a wider group of customers;
• Software-as-a-Service; and,
• Recent industry events and cloud conferences.

Take some time to listen to the podcast here.

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.

As a premier Oracle partner, Dell is excited to be on the show floor at Oracle OpenWorld 2009. We are proud to be demonstrating our comprehensive Dell | Oracle solutions including presentations both in our booth and at sessions outlining the benefits of migrating to Dell’s PowerEdge 11th generation x86 platform. In addition to our presentations, we’ll have plenty of migration experts at the show to help answer questions in our booth regarding Dell’s proven track record for partnering with customers to help them successfully navigate through the migration process.

By migrating from older generation x86 servers to Dell’s PowerEdge 11th generation x86 servers, customers are experiencing benefits including lower total cost of ownership, easier implementations and deployments, and greater scalability as their businesses continue to grow. With Dell’s 11th generation servers, customers are able to consolidate dispersed legacy environments onto one product line while reducing data center complexity, lowering power consumption, and reducing Oracle licensing fees - all while reaping the benefits of running their OLTP and DSS workloads faster than ever before. Whenever we release new servers, there is typically an incremental performance gain of approximately 10-15 percent. The technology packed in Dell’s PowerEdge 11th generation servers blew that away.

We reviewed three-year old servers that had recently fully depreciated. In comparison to the new 11th generation servers, we are able to achieve consolidation by an 8:1 factor - and sometimes even better depending on the workload. That type of consolidation equates to serious savings for our customers.  Think about it – eight servers consolidating to one, all within the power envelope of a single older generation server. That means a full 16U rack of servers becomes just 2U; 32 network ports consumed becomes four; 16 redundant PDU ports becomes two; and this is just the physical savings. Just imagine how that translates to software and power savings as well.

With a full suite of tested and validated Dell | Oracle solution stacks, Dell enables customers to minimize risk, reduce pre-implementation testing and ensure interoperability before the migration process even begins.

Visit us at booth 3809 in Moscone West and receive a USB key full of useful tools outlining the benefits of running your Oracle database workloads on Dell hardware and enter to win one of the new Dell Latitude Z portable notebooks . You will be sure to get a better understanding why moving to Dell’s open standards platform provides customers with a cost effective, end-to-end solution that enables faster implementations, simplified management and faster return on investment. 

To keep up with what we are doing at the event, follow us on Twitter @dellatORACLEwld, check out an earlier post on Direct2Dell with details of our activities and check back here and the Dell TechCenter.  If you miss us at the show, visit us at www.dell.com/oracle for more information.