Server

If you want to be the first on the block to do live migration using Hyper-V for Windows Server 2008 R2, Dell can help you get there. Dell now offers support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, the newest release in the Windows family of enterprise operating systems. This includes the release of Dell drivers, systems management capability and supporting documents to help you get up and running quickly.

Any software migration can be nerve wracking, so Dell has done the heavy lifting to take the risk out of implementing Windows Server 2008 R2.  

• Our engineers have missed countless dinners, piano recitals and episodes of American Idol while spending thousands of hours of testing and validation to make sure Dell products running Windows Server 2008 R2 are business-ready.
• We have complete driver support for Windows Server 2008 R2 for Dell hardware so you can deploy it, run it and manage easily. You can go here to download drivers.
• You are not in it alone. We offer a comprehensive suite of Dell ProConsult, Dell ProSupport and Dell ProManage services to help you get the most out of your Microsoft environment. In fact, if you already have a Dell ProSupport contract, you have existing support for Windows Server 2008 R2 and for Microsoft Windows 7.

We're ready to help you make the upgrade to R2 today and we will also have Windows Server 2008 R2 factory installed on all available new Dell PowerEdge servers in the third quarter of 2009. You can get the version you want. Dell will offer Standard, Enterprise, Web, Datacenter and Academic editions of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008 Foundation R2, designed for organizations with up to 15 users, on select PowerEdge systems.

One of the great opportunities about my job is that I get to travel onsite to customer locations, usually capture their story on video video . Earlier this year, I had the experience of traveling to Maine via Boston in the middle of winter - rough for a Texan! With my director, Arlette, in tow, we packed up the car in Boston and drove about 3.5 hours until we arrived in Lewiston, home of Northeast Bank.

The next day we were up bright and early -- and after scraping the ice off the rental car, we were on our way! The Northeast Bank employees were such gracious hosts to have Dell onsite, especially with all our video equipment. After spending the morning with members of the IT department, Greg and Drew, their IT challenges were real to me.

Reducing complexity and enabling employees to do their jobs more efficiently are two of the most important goals of the eight-person IT staff.

“All the regulations that apply to big banks apply to us, and we perform the same due diligence and the same compliance. The major difference is that we don’t have deep pockets. A dollar that we spend has to serve the greater good of the company and the communities we serve,” said Greg Thompson, vide president, Northeast Bank.

By using virtualization technology they were able to virtualize up to 50 servers using PowerEdge 2950 servers. An important part of that value proposition is the virtualized storage that the bank acquired with Dell EqualLogic PS5000XV and PS5000E iSCSI SAN arrays. By refreshing their technology the company saved 25-30 percent of its utility costs for power and cooling and avoided the cost of having to buy another cooling unit for the data center.

It’s a great experience for me to see how technology enables businesses to become more efficient. Despite the cold, this Texan soon realized how gorgeous the winter can be in Maine. Maybe next time, I’ll go when it’s a little warmer!

Using flash storage in computer-based appliances is nothing new. I remember the days of installing PCMCIA flash drives into routers (essentially computers) to update the firmware/OS. That was a great solution back then, but today the cost and complexity of designing a unique single purpose appliance like those old routers is often a significant deterrent.

Dell’s OEM Group has been working with hundreds of customers who have moved their appliance hardware development to Dell and are using commodity based servers for their core products. Until recently they were left with very few options when it came to flash-based storage for those appliances, but with the new appliance server platforms Dell has expanded and improved the flash storage options available to a developer.

Dell’s two main OEM-friendly appliance platforms, the PowerEdge R610 and R710, both offer multiple flash based storage options. They have an internal USB port, an optional internal SD-Card slot, and an optional external SD-Card slot for user removable or replaceable storage solutions.

All three of these options are managed via Dell’s lifecycle management controller (via changes to BIOS setting) to be disabled, enabled, or made bootable – that way an application could activate or deactivate a device on the fly. There are myriad ways these devices could be used in an appliance. For example, the operating system and application could reside on a USB key and no spinning hard drives would be required. One could place diagnostics, store backup configuration settings, hardware licensing keys, factory hard drive images, or whatever fits your solution, on flash devices that are internal to the system. Utilizing these flash storage options reduces support incidents and improves customer experiences while providing a more robust, secure, and reliable platform to the end user.

I have to ask you: if you're using white box servers to power your solution, are you getting this kind of appliance-inspired" design? We'll continue to talk about some of the advantages of our PowerEdge servers and some of the customers that are benefiting from our designs and our close relationship with them.

Ziff-Davis Enterprise Contributing Editor Steve Kovsky recently interviewed Dell's Anthony Dina on Dell's recent virtualization announcements and their ability to speed up ROI for enterprise data centers. In the interview, Anthony describes how Dell’s new approach emphasizes quicker returns and better measurement of each customer’s ROI.

Take a look.

Just like the certainties of death and taxes, we can count on processor companies to continually introduce chips with technology enhancements to meet the demands of data centers. This week our friends at AMD are introducing new members of the Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processor family (code named Istanbul) that amp up performance while improving power-efficiency.

Next month Dell will update three PowerEdge blade servers, the M605, M805 and M905, and three PowerEdge rack servers, the 2970, R805 and R905 with both the Istanbul HE and SE processors for systems that are optimal for cloud computing and web serving environments. The energy efficient Istanbul HE, running at 55 watts, will be available on all six platforms to meet the needs of companies with power and space constraints.

We will be revving up the Dell PowerEdge 2970, R805 R905 rack servers and PowerEdge M805 and M905 blade servers with top performing processor in the AMD portfolio. Pack four Six-Core AMD Opterons into a Dell PowerEdge server and you can crank on mission critical apps for database and CRM.

We’re excited to offer these impressive new AMD processors in our server portfolio in the coming weeks. You can configure your next server at www.Dell.com/PowerEdge and you can learn more about the AMD processors at AMD@Work blog.