Inside Enterprise IT

A Dell employee emailed from the Microsoft Management Summit this morning:

I am in the opening keynote here at MMS. Being the featured hardware partner for SCCM is awesome. The room is PACKED and attendees are hearing Microsoft talk about how great Dell systems management is.

Microsoft’s Bob Muglia, MS SVP, highlighted Dell’s preliminary bare metal deployment pack in his keynote. Hubba hubba and hey now.

Many of our customers use Microsoft’s System Center and Dell’s OpenManage to manage their infrastructure. And who do you think offers the most comprehensive device management through Microsoft’s System Center Suite? (Dell does) And we’re not resting. This week we’re announcing the upcoming availability of the latest Dell Management Packs for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager that will give customers superior monitoring and control of Dell desktops, portables, workstations, rack and tower servers, blades, networked storage devices and even printers.

Our new plug-ins and our roadmap to integrate Dell Services with Microsoft products means our mutual customers will continue to have industry leading tools to manage their IT infrastructures. All this talk about simplifying IT really means something.

Thanks for the kind words this morning Bob!

 VM Squad posted today about a problem he perceives exists with Dell EqualLogic arrays. Its not a problem, but that's what one of competitors is telling people.  The issue is the time it takes to upgrade firmware in our systems, which is 15 seconds in the systems we are selling today. 

What's interesting is that Derek Schwab posted about the exact same thing yesterday and how it worked so well. 

So what's up with that?  

Systems and storage solve intermittent communication problems through SCSI time outs. If the host system can't communicate, it keeps trying patiently for a long time before giving up. This is a lot longer than 15 seconds.  The amount of time depends on the host system implementation, but it is usually more than a minute and can take five or more minutes (or so I'm told). FWIW, this is the same mechanism that is used for multi-pathing.  After a SCSI timeout, the system tries to re-connect using an alternative path.   

So a 15 second delay (not an outage) a few times a year is not a very big deal. If you have to, you can schedule it for non-peak hours. Everything will work, applications will stay up and end users will see a short temporary hang - if they see anything at all. 

It's highly likely that a major disruption to corporate computing operations is going to come from increasing energy requirements and the actions we need to take in order to minimize their impact on the services we provide.  It's not just that energy costs are rapidly rising, but the use of that expensive energy is rising along with it.

Large scale data center operators are already heavily engaged in these discussions as evidenced by an interview Searchdatacenter did with Jeff Lowenberg of  The Planet, a hosting company in Houston, TX.  Jeff talks about a number of interesting things, including how they caulk leaks in the floor to keep from losing cold air and how they maintain their diesel generators. The last part on maintaining diesel fuel probably has excellent tips that anybody depending on large generators for backup electricity needs to know.

There's going to be new concepts, vocabulary  and acronyms to learn, such as air mixing,  hot aisle, cold aisle, chiller, CRAC (computer-room air-conditioning system), close-coupled cooling,  PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness)  and  DCE (Data Center Efficiency).

The good news is that fairly simple things can be done to improve the situation, without having to take more extreme measures as relocating to Iceland.  Dell's Dr. Albert Esser, who wrote today on Inside IT, was also featured in a recent article on the Computing site, talking about how temperatures in data centers can be kept warmer than people commonly think.   This article in CIO magazine also has some fairly simple ideas for more efficient cooling.

One of the biggest hurdles we face is getting senior management engaged.  This recent survey by the Uptime Institute (you've read about them if you read the other links in this post) contains fascinating information about the awareness of power and cooling as an issue. Many readers will likely identify with their findings that two thirds of those polled said their companies do not C-level sponsorship for green policy or governance mandates.  FWIW, The Uptime Institute puts on seminars for high density cooling, as well as other energy topics.  This podcast of an interview with Robert Sullivan is an introduction to those seminars.  Not having been to one of their seminars, I don't want this post to be perceived as an endorsement of their seminars - but if readers have comments to make about them, I'm more happy to post them.

I have a feeling this is going to be a huge deal and there will be lots of confusion and many opportunities for people to help each other out.  What are you seeing?  Is this stuff on your radar yet?  Is it front and center in your company or are you going it alone?  

Today we took the wraps off of Dell’s broadest enterprise portfolio of integrated products ever – all designed with an obsession to improve enterprise computing efficiency. In launch events in Sydney, London, Dubai and San Francisco we announced 14, count ‘em, 14 new enterprise products and six associated services to help companies and organizations grow their IT infrastructure faster, smarter and more efficiently.

Here is a run-down of the new portfolio: 

• Five new blades and servers and three workstations that are as gorgeous to look at as they are efficient at running massive data warehouses and thousands of exchange mail boxes at the same time;
• Five new enterprise-class storage arrays, including the EqualLogic PS6000, that write and read data blazingly fast;
• Six new Dell ProSupport, ProManage and ProConsult services that remove complexity;
• One, just one, innovative new systems management console that does the work of nine ordinary systems management consoles;

This announcement comes at a time when the industry is absolutely abuzz over a shifting competitive battlefield – with Cisco bravely entering the server market with a virtualization appliance – and rampant rumors of industry consolidation. Why so much interest in enterprise technology? Because there is a thirst for new technology that helps companies run their businesses more efficiently.

The industry is also anxiously awaiting the launch new Intel Nehalem architecture, which is expected to provide big improvements in performance, energy efficiency and virtualization performance.Dell, of course, will have those much-anticipated new Intel Nehalem processors in our servers, blades and workstations.

But that’s just one small part of what is new in our 11^th generation PowerEdge servers, introduced today. The new PowerEdge line-up has customer inspired innovations in simplified management, cutting-edge design, energy efficiency and virtualization performance. In lieu of spouting off benchmarks (which we can't talk about yet anyway), here is a little bit about the innovations that make it possible to get screaming performance. If you want more technical details, join us at 1pm CDT on March 31 for a live chat session with Dell and Intel Performance Engineers. We will discuss performance benefits of the Intel Nehalem architecture on the new Dell PowerEdge 11G servers. Click here to join in that session.

To rev up virtualization, Dell has embedded hypervisors, with up to 125 percent increased memory footprint and more integrated I/O. Plus, you have your choice of hypervisors from VMware, Citrix or Microsoft.

Our new PowerEdge servers and blades have energy-tuned technologies to slash power consumption while cranking performance capacity. We do that by loading the servers with efficient power supply units, improved system-level design efficiency, policy-driven power and thermal management and highly efficient standards-based Energy Smart components.

Finally, these are arguably the ‘sexiest’ servers in the industry – the Dell PowerEdge servers have already won awards for design including improved chassis, rails, cable management arms, hard drive carrier and latching. Not only do they look good and feel as solid, but they are a lot easier to set up and manage because of the inspired design.

Dell Precision Workstations

We also have three Nehalem-based Dell Precision Workstations – the T7500, T5500 and T3500. We partner with more than 35 leading software companies to make sure the programs and applications that matter most work incredibly well on our workstations (we certify 90 applications). We know you need stunning graphics, so we have new graphics options from both ATI and NVIDIA to make images and video come to life.

Systems Management

We’ve spent a lot of time working on embedded and simplified management functionality to help our customers take cost and complexity out of the data center. Dell is introducing the industry’s first embedded management functionality -- no more CDs. Our embedded management radically simplifies common IT tasks like deployment, diagnostics, update and configuration. We’re also offering ImageDirect, a Web browser–based service that lets organizations securely create, deploy and manage software builds on Dell systems.

Another new feature, Dell Management Console, our newest addition to our OpenManage portfolio, gives a simplified and consolidated view into the entire data center infrastructure – whether it’s Dell hardware or a different brand. It is available for immediate download and will ship with every new Dell server.

Not only does this console manage any hardware in the data center, it also completely integrates with industry leading tools including those from Symantec.  This means you can manage more functionality with fewer management tools.

To see more images of all the products we unveiled today, click on this link to see them on Dell's Official Flickr page.

I had a chance to catch up with Brad Anderson, SVP, Enterprise Product Group at Dell, to talk about the significance of this major announcement.

Here is what he had to say: