Storage

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.

Back in January, we collaborated with VMware and other storage vendor partners in a multivendor post to make sure iSCSI customers were successful in deploying iSCSI for VMware.  Dell has a close engineering partnership with VMware, as is EMC, to assure integration of storage platforms with vSphere via the vStorage APIs.

There have been some notable changes to VMware's architecture and how it works with iSCSI, so it was important for us to update you on the latest at the Dell TechCenter.

I LOVE coming together for the greater good!

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.

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.

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!