Workstation

The day that many of us have been waiting for has come: the official launch of Microsoft Windows 7 and general availability (GA) for consumer customers. What this means is that PC manufacturers like Dell can begin shipping systems with Windows 7 on them. Of course, large corporations and other enterprises have had beta programs in place for some time now so last week's announcement was very much focused on consumers' use of Windows 7. Microsoft hosted events in New York and elsewhere, and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer himself spent more than five minutes with Matt Lauer on The Today Show touting the benefits of Windows 7, but again heavily focused on consumers. In my view, Windows 7 is a given for consumers as almost all PCs will ship with it.

What I want to talk about today is why large companies should look at Windows 7. The enterprise is where the real decision is to be made and I think there are good reasons for corporations to begin the switch.

Dell recently did a survey of Federal IT decision-makers with the 1105 Government Information Group about their Windows 7 adoption. It’s not surprising that 72 percent reported their organizations did not adopt Windows Vista. Many of those organizations are likely running Windows XP and some may even be running Windows 2000.

Forrester Research published a report of their own recently, “Windows 7 Commercial Adoption Outlook,” that provides quite a few tips for migrating to the new OS. The report points out that about 79 percent of PCs used by small-to-medium businesses are still running Windows XP; that is in-line with our research in the federal space.

There have been a great number of comparisons of the new OS to Windows Vista as well as Windows XP. Many are suggesting that Windows 7 is very similar to XP so I'm sure many CIOs in large enterprises are wondering why make the switch at all. After all, no one in IT gets promoted for forcing an OS switch on their company’s workforce.

I think we all know how the current economic situation has led to a very frugal approach to IT spending. However, keeping laptops and desktops in circulation for more than four years can lead to higher maintenance and energy costs, and can reduce employee productivity. According to IDC, IT organizations may be incurring operating costs as much as 20.5 percent higher than necessary to acquire, manage and decommission their desktop and notebook PC equipment when comparing tightly managed three-year life cycles with less systematic, longer-span life cycle management strategies.

Also, J. Gold Associates says that keeping a laptop in circulation for years four and five can cost organizations $9,600 in lost end-user productivity and the cost to fix a laptop not under warranty can reach $1,425.

To provide evidence of lost employee productivity, Dell commissioned a performance study that compares current Latitude laptops products to similar models that are three and four years old. Examples of the results include:

• The battery life of a Latitude E4300 laptop running Windows 7 is up to 85 percent longer than a Latitude D620, a 3-year-old system, running Windows XP;
• The Latitude E6400 running Windows 7 offers up to 63 percent better performance than a Latitude D620 running Windows XP;
•  With a Dell Latitude E6400 laptop you can reduce boot time by up to 29 percent compared to a previous generation Latitude laptop.

(Details on all of these claims are available in the footnotes here.)

So, aside from all the cost, performance and enhanced features of Windows 7 as a motivator to migrate, there's also the news that Microsoft has finally announced an end-date to the support they'll offer for Windows XP. According to the Microsoft Support site, Windows XP will enter its “extended support’ phase on July 7, 2010 with extended support ultimately ending in April 2014. While that seems a long way off, many analyst firms are urging large enterprises to begin their migration planning now as it takes time to assess your applications and determine what your roll-out plan is. So, it seems that migration isn’t so much of a “will we” question, but more of a “when will we” question.

Dell recently announced Dell’s a Windows 7 Readiness Assessment to identify application compatibility, hardware compatibility and migration readiness and to provide the recommendations needed to help make your transition to Windows 7 as smooth as possible. But applications are but one part of the migration process. We're making available to you a webcast entitled "Preparing for Windows 7 Migration" that discusses just how a corporation conduct such a significant migration. Here are a few other issues that need IT staffs need to consider:

• Determining application compatibility including your Web applications;
• What new system imaging and deployment technologies are there to consider;
• Deciding how new virtualization technologies should be leveraged;
• Determining whether to deploy 32-bit or 64-bit versions of the OS;
• Dealing with extensive amounts of user data that will need to be migrated;
• Handling a more distributed workforce with a larger number of devices;
• Training both IT and end-users

We'd be eager to hear your thoughts on your organization. What are your migration plans? Do you plan to do a wholesale of all your clients at one time or stagger it out? What's the primary operating system you'll be migrating from? Do our numbers above match with your environment?

The Windows 7 team at Dell is excited about the progress we have made to get the OS ready for commercial customers and is looking forward to launch in just a couple of short months!  Effective August 7, 2009 MSDN, TechNet and Volume License Customers with Software Assurance can begin deploying the new operating system.  We have received many requests from our business customers that we post our Windows 7 drivers so they can begin testing and qualifying the new OS within their environments.

We've listened and recently, we have started posting Dell Certified Windows 7 drivers at www.support.dell.com/Windows7  where you will find the first set of drivers for many of our commercial systems.  

We will post additional drivers once they pass rigorous testing and certification standards--please check back if there is something you don't see.  For customers without dedicated IT staff interested in evaluating Windows 7, check out Windows Update.

Our services staff is also ready to help customers with the transition to Windows 7.  We have a number of deployment tools and services for businesses and institutions to make the migration from Windows XP, which is what most commercial customers are running, to Windows 7 easier.  ProConsult services that help customers understand how to best to deploy the new operating system, along with determining which features of the OS will benefit your business the most.  After deployment, our ProSupport and ProManage services can help administer and support systems throughout their lifecycle.

One of the best parts of my job is traveling and meeting face to face with AMD’s business partners and customers. Traveling from place to place and between the myriad trade shows we attend allows me to see AMD hardware in action outside of the lab and in end users’ everyday environments.

But with the hassle of ever-growing airport security lines, luggage limits, and the infamous last minute trips I’ve had revaluate what products, demos and equipment I take with me on the road—and needless to say it isn’t much. No matter what I decide, I find myself constantly asking the same few questions: is what I need to bring portable enough to travel with? Will it survive the trip? Will it help me accomplish the task at hand? Although it’s sometimes difficult to pack light, I’ve realized that by reducing the complexity and bulk of my load, I’ve actually increased by efficiency and productivity as a traveler.

Based on recent conversations with colleagues and customers, I’ve found that my thinking is certainly a ubiquitous theme in many professionals’ lives. These on-the go professionals are not willing to compromise their creative integrity to save a model here or an extra pixel there. However, in the same regard, these professionals cannot afford to haul around an entourage of equipment when meeting with clients. These professionals need a portable, yet dependable system to take with them on the road.

Enter the Dell Precision M6400 Mobile Workstation. This light-weight workstation, which is powered by the new ATI FirePro^TM M7740 graphics card, brings desktop-like performance and power to a mobile footprint, which means professionals get the maximum performance and multi-tasking capabilities that’s needed in just 10 lbs of chassis (goodbye 40 lbs. workstations of yesteryear!).

For folks in Digital Content Creation (DCC), CAD, and engineering fields, a mobile workstation means a new found freedom to go beyond the confines of their cubicle and take their creations straight to their customers’ doorsteps. More importantly, however, is the fact that they can rely upon these systems to work quickly and easily, with minimal wait time when working with complex models or data sets, ultimately helping to boost productivity and efficiency. You never think twice about bringing your trusty old laptop with you on the go, why should you have to think twice about bringing your workstation?

Although we cannot control those last minute business trips or lines at the airport, as professionals, we can exercise control over the tools we choose to support our livelihood. For many professionals, peace of mind is knowing that they have a single, satisfying, and powerful portable solution at their fingertips that’s not only going to enable them to achieve the tasks at hand, but also won’t weigh down the suitcase.

Well, soon anyway. Microsoft has said that they will RTM (release to manufacturer) gold code to the market by the end of this month. There are several folks talking about Windows 7 (Win7), so I won't go too deep into the OS itself. Brandon and team at Microsoft have done a great job of chronicling the developments and features of Windows.

I will say however, that I have been running the Win7 release candidate on my home computer and can tell you that it is rocks! It's fast, nimble, stable, etc. Our engineering and development teams have been working really closely with Microsoft to get the OS ready. We're already working with early adopter customers to deploy Win7 and their feedback is overwhelmingly positive. I'm happy to report that I've have been accepted into Dell's Win7 early adopter program and can't wait to get it on my machine!

What we find interesting about our commercial customers is that 86 percent of commercial customers are still using XP, according to Forrester. This presents a unique challenge for IT departments as XP is now 8 years old and customers are looking at a “skip-generation” upgrade to Windows 7 (read: clean wipe of the hard drive).

The first step in any software deployment is planning. As with any software deployment it is important to look at application compatibility. Customers must be able to understand what is compatible, what isn’t and how they remediate? Do they keep low-use applications? Will the way they package their applications be compatible with the OS? These are all questions customers need to understand the answers to. We can help them with our global Application Compatibility Factory that will help them get to the answers they need.

From there we help them assess, design and implement their deployments.   Rather than throwing a bunch of suits at the problem, Dell ProConsult services offerings utilize electronic discovery, Web based surveys, best practices, comparative data, reference architectures and logic to offer customers shorter, more impactful consulting engagements. 

We're pumped about Win7 - I haven't run into a single person within Dell that isn't. It's now time for us to get to work and help our customers make the transition.

In most cases, electronics and liquids do not mix. We’ve all had incidents that prove this. I’ve knocked over a glass of wine on my keyboard. It died, but I like to think it died happy with a belly full of Bordeaux. When my toddler ran into a pool I dove after him with my smart phone in my pocket. I wasn’t able to call home to complain about that one. I’ve clung to my digital camera with a death grip for fear that one unexpected toss of the boat would cast thousands of memories in the form of digital images from the palm of my hand to the bottom of the ocean floor.

But, sometimes putting electronics out to sea is the best thing you can do for your business. Geotrace, a leading seismic processing and imaging company based in Houston, packed the power of a data center into the hull of a ship to speed oil and gas exploration. The Geowave Endeavor, the ship that Geotrace deploys for 3D Seismic production, has a Dell PowerEdge M-series blade server high performance computing cluster on board. They have sixteen a fully-loaded Dell M1000e blade chassis that house a total of 256 Dell M600 blade servers networked with Dell PowerConnect M6220 Ethernet switches. Now that’s a boat load of servers.

I had a chance to catch up with Matt Gaskamp, Geotrace’s data center operations manager, briefly last week. He explained that having the ability to analyze and process information while off shore has given his company a significant edge over the competition. Previously, data collected while at sea could not be processed until the ship returned to shore. Now, Dell blade servers and workstations, software, and services allow Geotrace engineers to analyze the data as soon as it is gathered offshore, which has eliminated at minimum two months of wait time for its customers.

Energy efficiency is a concern with any data center, but it is especially important when it’s all housed on a ship. Geotrace uses Dell Remote Access Controllers and Dell OpenManage software to manage the blades remotely. It has power management tools that let their administrators easily configure maximum power thresholds by server or server group. To increase the energy efficiency of the servers while at sea Geotrace administrators can reset peak observed watts/amps and cumulative power, regulate and manage the fixed power supply aboard the ship.

The folks at Geotrace were kind enough to supply us with images of the Geowave Endeavor and the HPC cluster aboard the Endeavor, which is currently off the coast of Libya. You can view other images of the installation at Dell's Flickr pool. We also have a full case study on the Geotrace HPCC implementation if you'd like to read more.