Storage Hardware

Pushing the envelope and finding new innovative ways to deliver an HPC (High-Performance Computing) solution is a priority at Dell. Our recent partnership announcement with Cray and Microsoft illustrate how industry leaders are going about making HPC make more accessible, scalable and affordable.

The Cray CX1-iWS, available exclusively through Dell, combines Cray’s HPC experience with Dell’s market reach resulting in a desk side “supercomputer” that is easy to configure, deploy, administer and use. Leveraging industry standard components such as Intel Xeon processors, Windows 2008 HPC software stack, the Cray CX1-iWS provides a good starting point for engineers, scientists and researchers including R&D groups who need a scalable HPC cluster. The key points on how the Cray CX1-iWS extends and complements traditional workstations by providing an affordably-priced departmental or workgroup HPC hub are covered in my video.

I remember riding in the car which a bunch of teenagers a few months ago when the Seether song “Careless Whisper” came on the radio. They loved it - so edgy, such a great sound. Ugh, really?  Had they never heard of Wham?  George Michael? I’d like to forget the 80s sometimes, too, but please. How could those kids think that song was an original? Don’t even get me started about Limp Bizkit covering “Faith” … blasphemy.

It happens in music, and it happens in IT -- and it appears to have happened this week.

The recent VCE announcement from Cisco, EMC and VMware sounds very familiar, a lot like the Business-Ready Configurations for Virtualization (also known as vPOD) Dell’s been doing all year. 

Their “IT flexibility and lowering the cost of computing” message – yeah, doing that since March. If the popular saying “imitation is the best form of flattery” held true, these three companies would have also leveraged Dell’s passion for customer choice. But they didn’t. Instead, they seem to be focused on locking customers into a proprietary stack of technology. Customers don’t like that. That kind of situation could easily turn into a couple of million dollars.

Fortunately, Cadence Design Systems will never have to worry about that. Check out how they used Business-Ready Configurations to save about $2.7 million in physical-hardware cost.  Using Dell’s run books Cadence expects to double the speed at which they deploy VMs to roughly 200 per month. 

As we continue to integrate existing and new partners into the configs (EMC, Brocade, Juniper, Scalent), customers will find it even easier to deploy a customized, virtual environment start to finish.

Where is Milli Vanilli these days, anyway?

My husband says I’m passionate, and that’s why I like to argue. I’ve been wishing for an argument on FCoE for some time now (a wish in which I’m not alone), but all I run across is how FCoE is going to save the world.

In my search for the rest of the story (as the late Paul Harvey would have said), I talked with some of our technical folks to get the scoop. FCoE performance compares are one thing, but it’s important to balance the promises-of-FCoE argument with some concerns. Check out some of the FCoE discussion points pulled together by two of our engineers, and let us know what you think.

Wrapping up each quarterly issue of Dell Power Solutions Magazine is akin to a symphony of the publication persuasion, the movements carefully orchestrated to simultaneously deliver over 130 pages of content in print, digital, and Web form factors.

But all of the editorial in the September 2009 issue is so much beautiful music now and queued for immediate playback: get it by clicking through to the Web Edition or Digital Edition.

The key content track in this issue is around Storage Efficiency, headlined by an exclusive interview with the visionaries behind Dell’s game-changing enterprise storage portfolio that spans Fibre Channel, iSCSI, network attached storage (NAS) and direct-attach technologies.

Find out what Darren Thomas and Paula Long have to say about the state of enterprise storage and why storage virtualization plays such a pivotal role in data center optimization.

Deeper technical tracks in the storage section include “Allocating Storage with Virtual Provisioning on Dell/EMC CX4 Series Storage Arrays,” “Mixing Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet in a Dedicated SAN Infrastructure,” and “Dell EqualLogic PS4000 Arrays: Cost-Effective iSCSI SANs for SMBs and Remote Offices.”

Also, check out our Efficient Enterprise section in this issue for the latest in virtualization guidance around VMware vSphere 4 and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. And for a decidedly lighter reading track, check out our Online Exclusives page for new Enterprise Insights: quick-read, one- or two-page perspectives covering a much broader range of IT topics.

Among the latest postings are a pair of articles around social media, including “Top 5 Ways to Get Started with Social Media in the Enterprise” and “Wisdom of the Masses.”

I encourage you to take a look at these articles and let me know your thoughts on them.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve now been at Dell for almost 10 years. Where did the time go? I think back to my first year at Dell as a fledging server marketing manager, studying RAID groups, redundant-hot-swap whatever every night when I went home, so I wouldn’t get roasted by the hard-core technical sales reps (TSRs). Let’s be clear … they roasted me anyway, but at least it was on my terms. Anyone that knows me knows I thrive on sarcasm and strong personalities. Those guys shaped me into the storage person I am today.

I was part of the Small and Medium Business (SMB) group of Dell back in those days. I loved the emotion involved in that job … entrepreneurs growing their businesses, people in love with their job (not necessarily in love with IT) -- I could relate. After living in that universe for almost three years, it became my foundation. Our performance plans call it Customer Advocacy (or something like that), but it ingrained a passion in me that still surfaces regularly today.

Maybe that’s why I’m all over our new PowerVault NX300 Network-Attached Storage (NAS) platform. It gives me a chance to get back on my SMB soap box and show how we’re addressing their business problems with technology -- like the quick set up, convenient yet advanced file sharing and the ability to reduce duplicate files, do snapshots and replicate files. Dell’s seamless integration of our hardware and Windows Storage Server 2008 make all of this possible.

We announced the NX300 introduction today as part of a larger launch addressing SMBs. It feels good to give back a little efficiency to the folks that essentially started my career.