Strategy

Hi there readers, it’s day two of GiTEX technology week. Yesterday’s activities at GiTEX were branded as Microsoft Day and sessions covered key technology trends and best practices.

I had quite a few interviews yesterday, as well as attending a two of the Microsoft presentation sessions. One interview from Emirates Computers stood out because they took us on a tour of their green data centre room, which was pretty interesting. We also interviewed other Dell partners (that were available at the time), including Mindware, Key Information Technology and Aptec.

Below is a vlog with some highlights from the day.

Dell also trusted me to take pictures for the CX4 launch. It made me feel good because Dell trusted me to do so – like part of the team.

I’ve got to get myself ready for Gitex shopper next. That’s going to be a ball! It’s loud and fast paced - a lot of stuff going on. After shopper we’re going to dash back to the Dell Lounge for an interview with one of MTV’s nominated bands from the UAE called ABRI. I think this will be a blast!

Tune in for day three tomorrow.

HP made an interesting move today with the intent to acquire LeftHand Networks. Obviously HP is coming to recognize what Dell did a long time ago – simple, intelligent, automated storage is what the mid-market wants.

That’s why we moved to buy EqualLogic almost a year ago. What really interested us was the ease-of-use, intelligence and automation of EqualLogic’s systems. That was a big advantage that others don’t have.

As an example, let’s look at investment protection: With EqualLogic, you can expand using the latest and greatest hardware regardless of the EqualLogic generation you initially purchased. Load balancing between unequal nodes on LeftHand’s architecture is a much different proposition.

We now offer full integration of EqualLogic into Dell servers – particularly blades - and application solutions, so we can help our customers manage and protect their data center growth.

It’s no secret that Dell is #1 in iSCSI SANS worldwide.

Looks like HP is playing catch up.

As part of Dell’s ambitious pledge to become the greenest technology company on the planet, we’ve partnered with IDC, the respected analyst firm, to undertake a huge study of companies in Western Europe to see the degree to which green IT has come of age. The IDC Green IT Barometer looks set to become an annual snapshot of green sentiment in Europe.

The research included the views of an impressive 459 IT directors of European organisations with more than 1,000 employees and operating at least one datacentre.

Your interpretation of the results will be influenced by whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist. Almost exactly half of European enterprises now have a formal green IT strategy in place (if you’re a pessimist, almost half don’t!). But those that do have a green IT strategy predict they’ll save money this year. These are large companies, spending on average 160 million euros per year on IT. Those with a green IT strategy expect to deliver 14.5% real cost savings in the next 12 months – that equates to an massive 23.2 million euros per year.

There are many hurdles for firms to overcome on the way to establishing a formal green IT strategy. The most frequently mentioned challenges were lack of in-house skills and expertise; other constraints and priorities which are not compatible with a green IT strategy, and plain lack of time.

Dell has made it a priority to minimise environmental impacts at each stage of the lifecycle, from product design to manufacturing and operations to customer ownership and product retirement. We’re developing products and that are the most energy efficient in the world, thus helping our customers to reduce power consumption and increase efficiency. Also Energy Smart Data Centre Assessment services can help customers build more energy-efficient IT infrastructures.

A number of conclusions can be drawn from the IDC study. Perhaps most importantly, green IT strategies won’t succeed if they are pursued in an IT silo. Collaboration is required across disciplines within organisations, and amongst trading partners. Information is essential to understanding what needs to change. The key is to understand the true cost of ownership. This can be a challenge if the IT department doesn’t pay for energy costs.

Increasingly, green IT is becoming a corporate responsibility. 19% of companies in Europe have appointed someone whose role is dedicated to the implementation of a green IT strategy. For these companies, green IT has gone beyond an aspiration, and has become a way to save money whilst acting responsibly. That’s a double whammy, even if you’re a pessimist…

At Dell, we talk a lot about how to simplify IT. But the most powerful voices come from customers. Merlin Glynn, CTO of MedNetwoRx in Dallas, Texas, was kind enough to write this email and allow us to publish it here. Thank you for writing Merlin.

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I am the CTO of a small to medium-sized ASP where our annual budgets are very tight.  Perhaps in our IT market place more than any other, we attempt to stretch our buying potential to its utmost.  We have recently undertaken a 12 month DataCenter refresh project where we have upgraded/implemented over 160 physical and virtual servers along with associated DELL-EMC storage, OpenManage IT systems management, and other DataCenter Infrastructure objects.  I wanted to take this time to commend the Dell Enterprise Technology Center for the documentation, case studies, and technical sales material they produce.  In particular Scott Hanson’s many projects related to PowerEdge Servers and VMware have been of extreme benefit to us in choosing DELL as our preferred hardware vendor.  Documents such as Competitive Power Savings with VMware Consolidation on the Dell PowerEdge 2950 gave us template data to plan power consumption and capacity analysis of the large virtualization component of our data center refresh.  In the past 12 months we have consolidated 100+ various x86 platform servers onto 26 Dell Poweredge 2950s.  Recent studies with VMware DRS and VMotion capabilities on Dell servers, provided by Mr. Hanson and the Dell Enterprise Technology Center, have also greatly assisted us in planning for our current VMware Disaster Recovery implementation.  The output of this group is the main reason we continue to deploy DELL servers in our environment today.  We know we can trust the real world data provided in these projects to make decisions that will maximize our deployment dollar.

Mednetworx focuses on providing (EHR) Electronic Health Records and (PM) Practice Management software to our customer base via a secure ASP application presentation scenario.  In addition to our DataCenter Refresh project, our company has also gone from acquisition to production with an implementation of an Allscripts TouchWorks PM and EHR solution for the New Mexico Department of Health.  New Mexico has 33 counties and the state's total area is 121,665 square miles.  At a population density of 15 per square mile, New Mexico is the sixth most sparsely inhabited U.S. State.  THIS IMPLEMENTATION EFFORT SPANNED 55 LOCATIONS IN ONLY 12 MONTHS, and was implemented on DELL Poweredge 2950 servers, DELL-EMC CX storage along with Cisco, Citrix, and VMware products.  We could not have performed this implementation without the rapid purchase cycle of DELL distribution and ‘up-front’ knowledge of the server capabilities in our planned environment, which we gleaned from material produced by the Dell Enterprise Technology Center.  So from one of your ‘smaller’ customers, I say thanks for the job these guys and DELL as a whole have done for our SMB business model.