Vlogs

Michael and other Dell team members spent the greater part of Wednesday morning last week in Washington, D.C. participating in the IT Energy Efficiency Summit. Dell partnered with CIO magazine to host this first-ever event designed to provide CIOs and other IT decision makers with insight into energy efficient computing strategies.

In a moderated question and answer session with CIO publisher emeritus Gary Beach, Michael discussed various aspects of the greening of the IT landscape. (See highlights from his comments in vlog below.) He discussed Dell's drive to become the greenest technology company on the planet, our ReGeneration movement, how we consider the environmental impact behind everything we do as a business and the importance of carbon intensity—stay tuned for more on this front.

He also shared different ways organizations can minimize their energy footprints, such as incorporating more energy efficient systems across their IT infrastructures, utilizing advanced power and cooling solutions and leveraging virtualization technologies. By applying an energy efficient approach to every aspect of their operations, Michael reminded attendees that their organizations stand to significantly reduce energy costs while meeting their corporate green initiatives. Put simply, embracing energy efficiency makes good business sense.

Driving energy efficiency into the data center is certainly a topic of growing importance among CIOs considering that such facilities are massive consumers of power. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, data centers account for an estimated 1.5 percent of the nation's energy use. This number is expected to double within the next five years as power and computing performance demands continue to increase, costing an estimated $7.4 billion annually. 

Attendees at the forum also heard from David Rodgers, deputy assistant secretary for energy efficiency with the U.S. Department of Energy. Mr. Rodgers reiterated Michael's point regarding the critical role that IT has and will continue to play in reducing overall power consumption. He spoke of the federal government's efforts to continue growing the economy without growing our nation's energy use, and encouraged attendees to make use of technology in new and innovative ways to help lower energy consumption within their organizations. Rodgers believes the path toward a more energy-conscious culture will be driven by industry rather than federal mandates. He envisions a future in which the IT industry works more closely with the federal government to help define new standards around energy use and drive increased adoption of energy efficient technology and best practices.

We want to thank CIO magazine for organizing the IT Energy Efficiency Summit and helping to bring attention to an increasingly important subject. Here are video highlights from Michael's conversation with Gary Beach during the event.

Hi, I'm John Joseph.  I recently joined Dell during its acquisition of EqualLogic, where I was vice president of marketing for 5 years.  It's been an amazing experience since 2003 when we worked to convince people that iSCSI SAN technology was real, and would cut the cost and complexity of deploying networked storage for IT. Five years later, we're a reference platform for VMware environments, we have nearly 4,000 customers in more than 30 countries and we're on the eve of bringing EqualLogic's products to the world on a massive scale as part of the Dell family. I'm excited, and Dell's reception has had a lot to do with it. The kind words, incredible enthusiasm and support of the Dell employees that I've met so far have been fantastic.

What truly excites me about this opportunity is our ability to share with the world the experience that our customers have had with our products, partners, and employees.  The reason for this is that our customers are best situated to say what makes the EqualLogic PS Series so unique.  And thankfully, they are usually eager to tell their story. 

Be assured we're not satisfied to sit on our laurels and wait for people to come to us.  We are well aware that serving a larger customer base can only be done by making the investments necessary to keep them delighted with Dell EqualLogic storage.  This includes expanding our support team while continuing their exceptional customer care, and making our VAR channel stronger, better trained, and profitably happy. Further, the technology innovation cannot stop. Look for us to enrich our storage management capabilities, broaden our application and third party integration, and build out end-to-end solutions for our customers.

The latest example of our continuing product improvement came today in the new PS5000E array for that packs 16 TB into our standard 3U chassis - that's nearly 50% more capacity per modular array.  EqualLogic engineering, run by my partner in crime Paula Long, worked tirelessly to test, beat, bang on, stress, retest, and QA these cutting edge drives so that the Dell EqualLogic PS Series begins its new life with industry-leading terabyte-drive technology on a unified hardware platform. 

Here's a vlog where I talk a bit more about what customers can expect from Dell and EqualLogic in the future.

The latest example of our continuing product improvement came today in the new PS5000E array for that packs 16 TB into our standard 3U chassis - that's nearly 50% more capacity per modular array.  EqualLogic engineering, run by my partner in crime Paula Long, worked tirelessly to test, beat, bang on, stress, retest, and QA these cutting edge drives so that the Dell EqualLogic PS Series begins its new life with industry-leading terabyte-drive technology on a unified hardware platform. 

Even though the Dallas Cowboys won't be playing, I'm looking forward to tomorrow's game. I'm interested to see the reaction to the commercials tomorrow, and welcome your comments here.

Update, February 3: Here is the Dell (PRODUCT) RED Super Bowl ad. The song that's playing is Mick Jagger's "Charmed Life" from his record, Very Best of Mick Jagger.

Beyond that, I saw that Jeremiah Owyang set up @Superbowlads on Twitter to allow the community to rate Super Bowl commercials in real time. Here's his post for more details. Rather than trying to re-create the steps, here's a screenshot from Jeremiah's post that explains how to do it (I hope you're okay with the screenshot approach, Jeremiah!).

Also, just so you know, the screenshot is hyperlinked to the Terraminds page that Jeremiah links to in step 3.

I'll post the Dell (PRODUCT) RED Super Bowl commercial here in this post once it airs tomorrow. We welcome your comments here, and I'll be watching the overall reactions via @Superbowlads in Twitter and the Terraminds RSS feed.

Update, February 3: Some folks are using this Tweetscan feed to track the overall conversation. It seems to be update faster than Terraminds.

Today we completed the EqualLogic acquisition, a leading provider of high-performance storage area network (SAN) solutions designed for virtualization and ease-of-use. The purchase extends Dell's leadership in simplifying IT for customers. 

Customers face extreme challenges with data growth. Storage solutions that use existing infrastructure, install in minutes not days, manage themselves, can grow easily as needs increase and plug into the virtualized IT ecosystem will help businesses with their storage needs. EqualLogic provides these storage solutions and that's the incredible value that Dell will now be able to deliver to our customers.  With Dell's PartnerDirect channel, we will unleash the power of iSCSI and virtualization to redefine the economics of storing and processing data.

Dell plans to preserve and build on EqualLogic's successful channel program in addition to offering products directly from Dell.  Starting today in the U.S. and ultimately around the world, current EqualLogic partners will be enrolled into PartnerDirect and are eligible for Dell's newest certification—Enterprise Architecture.  Certification requirements and benefits are modeled after EqualLogic's widely-regarded channel program and extend the benefits of Dell's full server and storage product lines.

Here's a vlog where I talk more about this acquisition.

After talking to several folks here at Dell, I can say that we have a lot of folks who are excited to bring the PowerEdge M-Series modular blade servers to market, along with a new 10U enclosure. Building on the PowerEdge 1955 blade system that InfoWorld recently named Best Blade Server System of the Year, Dell focused much attention on energy efficiency, I/O flexibility and usability in designing the new M-Series system.

The 10U PowerEdge M1000e enclosure supports up to 16 PowerEdge M600 or M605 blade servers that offer two quad-core Intel  Xeon or AMD Opteron processors per blade.  We improved power and cooling by starting with our Energy Smart technologies, using high efficient fans and power supplies, and through Dynamic Power Management—which allows customers to use software to dynamically load balance across power supplies, or to even turn off power supplies when they're not needed. Flexibility is also key, and the M-Series has been designed to support snap-in capability all the way down to the switch interconnects. The PowerEdge M1000e also offers all kinds of connectivity options—including the upgradable Dell PowerConnect M6220 Layer 3 switch, three different Cisco switch options, two 4Gb Fibre Chanel switch options from Brocade, Fibre Channel host bus adapters from QLogic and Emulex, and more.

These blade servers are ideal for medium and large size customers who are faced with space constraints, power and cooling challenges, and the need to scale their environment quickly wihout sacrificing ease of deployment.

In this vlog, I talked to Chad Fenner from the PowerEdge server team. He covers quite a bit here... providing insight into the development process, usability enhancements, more details on energy efficiency, ease of use, connectivity and flexibility and more.

Folks on the development team told me that lots of customer feedback they gathered during the 2-year development cycle helped shape this product. Like I mention in the video, there's many different topics to cover with a product like this.

We look forward to your comments—please let us know what areas you want to discuss in more detail and we'll go from there.