Inside Enterprise IT : Customer

Betfair Places its Odds on Dell With Windows 7

DELL-Kathy B — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:02:00 GMT

Last week we experienced one of the most significant and exciting launches from Microsoft… the release of Windows 7! As part of the Microsoft Technology Adoption Program (TAP), Dell consultants worked with a number of customers during their testing and implementation of both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

At Betfair – home of the world’s biggest betting community – robust IT is crucial. Staff at the firm process six million transactions every day; that’s more than the combined total of the European stock markets. Security and high availability are paramount, as are energy efficiency and ease of maintenance.

When the IT team replicated a standard workflow across various operating systems, they saw a 20 percent performance increase with Windows 7. This improved performance will boost staff productivity, as well as increase the time the IT team has for value-added work. New features of Windows 7, including BitLocker and AppLocker will improve security. With staff queuing for upgrades, the end-user benefits are clear. Eighty percent of Betfair’s staff in Europe will be using Windows 7 within the next month.

Ian Burgess, Head of Microsoft and Datacentre Platforms, Betfair says: “We have a list of tickets in our support system from people requesting Windows 7. It’s faster, easier to use and has lots of features that produce a more polished, seamless user experience.”

Betfair has also significantly reduced energy consumption. For example, Windows Server 2008 R2 takes advantage of the energy saving features of Dell PowerEdge servers and Intel technology. Hyper-V will also help to achieve efficiency and simplify management. Burgess says: “One of our Hyper-V clusters has four nodes with capacity to spare, whereas before there were seven nodes at full capacity. That equates to a massive energy saving across our datacentres. We’ve achieved this through the combined features of the PowerEdge R610 servers, and Windows Server 2008 R2.”

So whether your main motivation is the safety of your mission critical data, energy efficiency or the time your IT team spends managing your client estate, read on for an idea of how Dell can support you. If you're interested in more information your company's migration to the Windows 7 environment, take a look at IT Expert Voice, where best practices and news related to Windows 7 in the enterprise is discussed.

Storage in the Cloud — Talking to Zmanda’s CEO

DELL-Barton G — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 16:11:00 GMT

I first met Chander Kant, CEO of open source cloud back provider Zmanda, last year at the MySQL conference. At that time we did an audio interview. Just like Jonathan, this time around I caught him on “film.”

This is the fourth out of nine interviews I conducted earlier this month at Cloud World/Open Source World.

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Some of the things Chander talks about:

Thanks to open source and the cloud, Zmanda is able to provide “radically simple to use and cost effective” back-up software.
Zmanda had its roots in a project out the University of Maryland back in ‘91.
How Chander got the idea to build a business around this project.
How the cloud is a good fit for secondary and tertiary storage.
Cloud storage is often people’s first foray into the cloud. One reason is the ease of billing.
Why a publisher moved their storage to the cloud.

But wait there’s more…

Stay tuned for five more interviews from Cloud World/Open Source World coming soon to this URL:

Michael Crandell — CEO of Right Scale

Ken Oestreich — VP of product marketing at Egenera

John Keagy — CEO of GoGrid

James Staten — Analyst covering cloud computing at Forrester

Luke Kanies — Founder of Reductive Labs, maker of Puppet

Pau for now…

Smart Healthcare Live

NHS Northamptonshire-Mark A — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:00:00 GMT

I spent a day at this year's Smart Healthcare show in London's Earl's court. I've been going for more years than I can remember - I've spent almost 15 years in healthcare IT. For me, it's a great opportunity to see the latest products and solutions from hundreds of healthcare ICT suppliers. I'm always looking for ways I can innovate to help NHS Northamptonshire improve the patient care experience - and that includes looking for ways to free up funds to do this.

Our aim is to be the best Primary Healthcare Trust (PCT) in the East Midlands - so we need to do as much as we can with the funds we have. Normally at Smart Healthcare I am a bit of a spectator. But this year, I had the opportunity to talk about how we're cutting our energy costs by about 25% each year and reducing carbon footprint by approximately 121 tonnes per year (equivalent to the output of 39 cars) with a customised datacentre solution from Dell and APC.

The impetus to this solution was moving to a new headquarters. We thought: how could we more effectively run our IT systems so we can divert more money towards improving patient care? Our answer: cutting total cost of ownership in the datacentre so the PCT can devote more funds to local services. And by doing this, we also help the trust meet government targets on reducing carbon emissions.

After my presentation, I spoke to a journalist about the new datacentre and he asked me why we needed eight terabytes of storage space. I told him about how the PCT analyses the different healthcare needs of the region- what we term trending. To ensure that we are investing in the right areas of patient care in the right areas of the region, we are reducing investment in areas where there is not such a big need. For example, some towns have a higher proportion of smokers than others, we want to ensure we are focusing most of our anti-smoking programmes there rather than in other parts of the region where there are fewer smokers.

So, the datacentre plays a vital function in helping the PCT achieve its goal to provide the best possible healthcare services for nearly 700,000 people living in the East Midlands.

Frederick Memorial Healthcare Virtualizes Its Data Center with Dell, VMware

DELL-Bruce Eric — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 12:30:00 GMT

One of the customers that participated in yesterdays' press briefing with Dell and VMware was Frederick Memorial Healthcare (FMH), which began providing health services to Maryland residents over 100 years ago.

As the hospital is entering its second century in an expanded facility, Roy Turner, FMH's server systems engineer, explains how the healthcare provider's use of technology is key to delivering top-quality care to its patients. For example, FMH is one of the few hospitals in its area with a wireless infrastructure throughout the facility to make information and communication instantly available to care providers.

Dell has helped FMH with IT projects in the past, and the customer trusted the Dell's advice when we recommended VMware as the leading virtualization technology.

Dell ProConsult Services performed the hospital’s initial data center virtualization implementation using VMware ESX 3.5 and VMware Virtual Center 2.5. Dell helped the IT team deploy 106 virtual servers on six new Dell PowerEdge R900 servers.

FMH asked Dell to help it upgrade to VMware vSphere 4 and the VMware vCenter Server. The Dell Services team worked hard to ensure FMH’s VMware vSphere 4 project was a success, and helped set up an initial environment and test the upgrade path FMH would use for its production environment. Roy and the server engineering team have virtualized over 100 servers, with 75 being converted from physical to virtual, reducing power consumption and cooling in the data center.

Roy spent a little bit of time with us explaining their challenges and how they worked with Dell and VMware.

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Dell, VMware and Customers Discuss Benefits and Realities of Data Center Virtualization

DELL-Bruce Eric — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 17:42:00 GMT

Dell and VMware this week briefed reporters on our respective company's virtualization strategies and some of the trends that customers are facing. Media coverage of the event is already appearing, including this piece from Jean Baptiste Su on his TechPulse 360 blog.

Joining Dell's Paul Prince, Chief Technology Officer for Dell's large enterprise business, and Steve Herrod, VMware's CTO and senior vice president of the company's research and development, were a number of customers that are actively using virtualization technologies in their infrastructures. Dell/VMware customers Cadence, Northwest National Gas, Trilliant and Frederick Memorial Healthcare have all implemented virtualization and are seeing the benefits. We have interviews with several of those customers that we plan to bring to you soon.

Following yesterday's press briefing, we sat down with Paul and Steve after the event to get their thoughts on the interaction and what was discussed. Many of you may have followed us as we live-tweeted the event. If not, check out @bruceericatdell, @mattmcginnis, @dellservergeek, @kongy_dell for those tweets from yesterday afternoon.

Dell has a long history with VMware. In fact, our virtualization strategy is based on this long history – we’ve been a top partner and reseller for more than seven years. We’ve worked closely together to develop platforms that are built for virtualization and optimized for cloud computing applications. For instance, we were involved in the development of the vStorage API from the beginning; it’s a part of our shared vision. Last Spring, we unveiled vStorage-ready Dell EqualLogic virtualized SANs, meaning that we’ve enabled VMware virtual machines to take full advantage of the advanced intelligence of our storage arrays.

Take a look.

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Northeast Bank Reduces IT Complexity With Dell

DELL-Kristin S — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 13:58:00 GMT

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!

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Recruitment Firm Undergoes Desktop Refresh

DELL-MaryKay H — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:00:00 GMT

Recently, I went to lunch with some great folks from Liaison Resources, a local creative and marketing staffing firm. They provided me with a contractor that has worked on my team for over a year now, and she’s stellar. That said, I gather that finding stellar workers isn’t always easy to pull off. I heard some pretty interesting stories about sloppy applications and even sloppier wardrobe choices. Some of the stories made me laugh and others made me really glad I wasn’t challenged with the things they face on a regular basis.

Soon after I got back to the office, I saw a new case study on Hays Recruitment, a firm that also provides permanent, temporary or interim staff, but on a global scale. I gave the story a read and learned that they face a lot of the same types of challenges I had just heard about in person – only bigger because of their size and worldwide reach. They need to be able to quickly access in-depth information on potential candidates so they can keep pace with last year’s achievement of placing nearly 400,000 temporary and permanent workers.

To access that information quickly, Hays chose to refresh their aging, slow desktop infrastructure with a standardized environment on Dell OptiPlex desktops with Hardware Customization and ProSupport. And it was no small task. 2,500 PCs had to be replaced and another 2,000 refreshed throughout 250 remote offices. But it was well worth it. Not only do employees now have quicker, more efficient access to their data and to one another, but hardware calls to the IT helpdesk are down by 40 percent and they are saving 75 percent on maintenance costs. Cool.

I know recruiters aren’t always perfect, but it was awesome to hear about both a small/local and a large/global agency getting a lot of stuff right. Let me hear your staffing stories, temporary, permanent, good or bad. They’re almost always entertaining!

Kyocera Simplifies IT With Dell

DELL-MaryKay H — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:59:00 GMT

I used to have a Kyocera phone. I liked it well enough, but since my account is with Verizon and they don’t carry that brand anymore, I have since migrated to a LG’s enV(2). But when I had the chance to check out what Kyocera is doing in their IT department, it got me thinking about my old phone again, and wondering if I should try to get a new one. The business decisions Kyocera are making seem to be pretty smart, so I’m betting their phones are too.

Recently, they were investigating new ways to meet customer demand for their communications services, and they turned to Dell to help them design a solution. They came up with a virtualized infrastructure using VMware and PowerEdge R805 servers. And for storage, they chose Dell EqualLogic PS5000 Series SAN arrays.

By now you’re thinking, so what? Unless you get really geeked out about technical stuff, you probably don’t really care much what’s behind the IT curtain, right? Well hang with me a minute longer because it’s about to get interesting.

See, I think that companies who are figuring out new ways to save money, be more streamlined and more standardized are the kinds of companies I want to buy from - and buy stock from. The old school companies who are all about doing things they way they always did are the ones who are going to tank. Kyocera revised it’s IT, turned a high opex department into a low opex department, and saved the company a ton of money annually.

I think that rocks and I think other companies should be doing the same. Don’t you?

Southern Company Goes Green With Dell

DELL-Kristin S — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:00:00 GMT

World Environment Day was June 5 and I thought it was only fitting that we highlight a customer who is committed to keeping their company green and providing technology to help their customers save energy as well. Atlanta-based Southern Company is the premier energy provider of the Southeast, serving over 4.4 million customers. While the company is committed to be green, they were seeing their kilowatt hour consumption grow by as much as 15 percent and producing more of the corresponding CO2 emissions every year because their own data center.

By instituting a green data center program, the IT team at Southern realized they needed to do something to stop the server sprawl and energy consumption. By virtualizing and consolidating its data center servers using VMware ESX technology on PowerEdge R900 servers, Southern has eliminated over 1,340 tons of CO2 emissions.

“As a result of the virtualization, we avoided more than two million kilowatt hours worth approximately $200,000 over a period of a year and a half,” says Dan Traynor, IT infrastructure director, Southern Company. In the process, they were also able to put a little money back in their pockets to the tune of $1.3 million by not having to add new equipment in their datacenter. That was a huge savings, especially with many organizations trying to extend the life of their equipment.

Read more on Southern Company and how they leveraged technology to be greener. To learn more about Dell and their commitment to the environment, go to Dell Earth.

What “cool” things is your organization doing to be green in the data center? I’d love to hear your stories!

A Look Behind Wolfram Alpha's Infrastructure With R Systems

DELL-Bruce Eric — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:41:00 GMT

As you may recall, I published a post a few weeks ago about Dell's involvement in the launch of Wolfram Alpha, a computational search engine that is built on servers from Dell's Data Center Solutions team.

In this video, R Systems' CEO Brian Kucic outlines the infrastructure behind Wolfram Alpha and how it was built out in less than two weeks.

Brian says the cluster, called R Smarr, is the fastest privately owned cluster in the U.S., the fifth fastest Dell cluster in the U.S. and the 44th fastest supercomputer in the world (according to the June 2008 Top 500 list).

Wolfram also did a post on their deployment over on their blog today. The post is titled "Building Rome in a Day," appropriate for the significant amount of work that was done to bring their supercomputer online in such a short period of time.

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