Inside Enterprise IT : Data Center

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.

The Scoop on Virtual-Ready Infrastructure (VRI)

Dell-Jennifer G — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:41:00 GMT

Remember Michael Dell talking at Oracle OpenWorld about Dell’s plan to reduce IT infrastructure spend by $200 billion? That doesn’t happen by making pretty PowerPoint. The team here in Round Rock has a rock-solid plan to bring Virtual-Ready Infrastructure (VRI) to life and soon.

So, what’s in it for customers … the folks actually struggling with hundreds of unique tools, scores of unique skill sets and dozens of unique processes. The ultimate goal of Dell’s VRI is to reduce customers IT spend through the use of fewer tools, fewer tasks and optimized IT delivery.

Paul Prince, Dell’s CTO, Enterprise Product Group, explains our VRI investment in the clip below.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

The unified resource manager Paul mentions is a solution from Scalent Systems, a partnership we announced during VMworld this year.

It will allow you to dynamically manage your servers, storage and networking and allows one of the biggest resource savings:

Rack once, cable once – modify workloads without touching the physical infrastructure
Works with existing hardware
Incorporates both physical and virtual workloads
Doesn’t effect in-band server performance

We’re excited about what’s evolving, so please stay tuned. We’ll definitely be back to share more information on how this and the rest of VRI will come to life for you.

A Data Center That Fits in the Overhead Bin

DELL-Barton G — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:39:00 GMT

Jimmy Pike is the director of systems architecture for the Data Center Solutions group here at Dell and self-proclaimed “head geek.” Using a tool case with its insides stripped out, part of an old inbox and a bunch of off the shelf components he has created the world’s first portable “data center.” (All for the princely sum of ~$2,000)

(Please visit the site to view this media)

This former toolkit now holds:

Two dual-socket servers featuring 2.5GHz Intel processors
One server running Windows ‘03 acting as the DHCP and domain server and the other running Red Hat linux.
2 x 1TB SATA drives for each of the servers
32GB of memory
A single central power supply
A 5-port Gigabit Ethernet switch
2 x 500GB scratch discs

and a whole bunch more…

Extra credit reading:

GigaOm – Exclusive: Dell Shows Off a Data Center — In a Briefcase!

Pau for now…

Michael Dell Paints His Vision of the Efficient Enterprise at Oracle OpenWorld

DELL-Greg W — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:47:00 GMT

You might think that after two full days of keynotes, breakout sessions, events and meetings at Oracle OpenWorld it would be hard to excite a convention hall full of business and IT leaders, but Michael Dell had just the right formula with:

A compelling vision - Redirect IT dollars from management and maintenance to innovation and improving the business by building an Efficient Enterprise;
Big commitments for quantifiable results like working to take $200 billion of inefficiency out of the $1.2 trillion IT infrastructure industry spend and driving $200 million in savings for Dell's own IT;
Impressive statistics, something almost all of us in the IT industry get into, of the power of the Dell and Oracle partnership and Dell's leadership and track record in providing solutions;
Cool products, including:
- Dell's 11th generation of PowerEdge servers were onstage and Michael highlighted the enhancements in these new servers to simplify deployment, enhance performance, reduce complexity and lower power and cooling requirements;
- He also discussed more innovation to come next year with new PowerEdge servers based on Intel Nehalem EX architecture; and,
- Talked about continued enhancements to the EqualLogic storage products, like SSD (launched this year) and 10Gbps Ethernet (coming soon) that will drive efficiency and performance for storage.
A blueprint to make this vision a reality including:
- Standardization on open standard solutions built on x86-based servers;
- Simplification by starting with the applications and taking the complexity out of the way they are supported and managed, and by using Virtualization and Storage Consolidation;
- Automation by streamlining Services delivery and enabling self-service IT models where critical business services can be deployed through the cloud.
Dell's own plan - Robin Johnson, CIO of Dell, shared how he is driving inefficiency out of the Dell IT machine
Having fun - Everyone was excited by Larry Ellison's surprise appearance and from the return of the Tech Force alliance!

Hopefully you are as excited as we are about building the Efficient Enterprise, and if you’re here this week, be sure to come see us in the booth.

You can follow us on Twitter @dellatORACLEwld and check out my earlier post on Direct2Dell with details of all our activities.

Oracle from Dell – What are the key considerations?

DELL-Greg W — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 13:00:00 GMT

Oracle OpenWorld is in full swing and things are exciting here in San Francisco. If you’re here, be sure to stop by the booth and say hi, see a demo, listen in on a presentation, enter to win one of the new Dell Latitude Z portable notebooks and catch one of the many breakout sessions with Dell. Also be sure not to miss Michael Dell’s keynote Tuesday, October 13 at 8:30 AM in Moscone North, Hall D.

One of our focuses at Dell is to help people plan for an Oracle deployment. If you fall into that camp, here are a few items for you to consider:

Is the solution scalable and based on industry-standard application and technology solutions?
Can you get the complete stack of products and solutions, applications and hardware to help you address your pain points and focus on meeting your goals?
Are you simplifying IT at the least possible acquisition cost?
Can you count on highly trained Oracle Sales Specialists to guide you on what products and solutions would best fit your requirements?
Are value-add services available to enhance your productivity and promote IT simplicity through the design and implementation of Oracle solutions comprised of standards-based x86 architecture?
Do you have everything you need for systems integration such as pre-engineered, tested, and validated Intel-based Oracle database solutions on Red Hat/Oracle Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows Server to ensure compatibility and reduce pre-implementation testing with entire tested solution stacks: servers, storage, switches, operating systems, and Oracle Database software?
Can you get sizing tools to help you size your projects and provide guidelines for the required infrastructure?
Are finance options available to help you close the gap between your technology needs and cash flow?

If you need assistance, Dell can provide all these things. Dell and Oracle are committed to each other’s technologies and here are some great examples of this commitment.

You can find out more, like Dell’s Solution sizing, validations and reference architectures, here as well: www.dell.com/oracle

We provide total solutions in terms of the entire stack all tested, and validated, Hardware, Storage, Networking, OS Support, Power & Cooling, Oracle Software, Services, Finance and finally Purchase Consolidation. This is The Difference at Dell. This is why our customers choose Dell / Oracle.

We hope you’ll get to know the Dell and Oracle experience this week. Follow us on Twitter @dellatORACLEwld, check out my earlier post on Direct2Dell with details of our activities and check back here and the Dell TechCenter to stay up to date on all that we’re doing with Oracle.

Dell Works with PlateSpin to Manage Data Centers/Customer Workloads

DELL-Timothy W — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Dell recently had a big showing in San Francisco for vmworld 2009. We had quite a few of our people out there as my colleague Andrew Gilman wrote about here, showing off our capabilities and making some pretty cool announcements.

From a services perspective, there are some interesting virtualization initiatives underway at Dell as well. Dell ProConsult services help customers dramatically simplify their IT infrastructure, reduce operating costs and freeing up resources for new business initiatives -- especially in the area of virtualization. While virtualization is often seen as a panacea, unless it is planned and managed correctly, it can create more problems than it solves.

In order to help customers streamline and optimize virtualization planning and deployment, Dell will expand use of PlateSpin Recon to provide Virtualization Readiness Assessments and PlateSpin Migrate for Rapid Deployment Services. PlateSpin is the first data center workload profiling, analysis and planning tool to combine consolidation planning with virtual capacity management.

The goal for using these tools is to help save companies OPEX and accelerate the savings through the use of a single Workload Management solution that spans that data center including multiple hypervisors and operating systems, as well as physical and virtual workloads.

It is through these partnerships and expanded services offerings that we continue our vision to simplify our customer's IT infrastructures.

Cloud Tamer: Right Scale’s CEO Michael Crandell

DELL-Barton G — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:07:00 GMT

I’m getting down to the end of the videos I recorded last month at Cloud World/Open Source World and I’ve saved some of the best for last. My penultimate interview is with Michael Crandell, CEO of Right Scale.

Right Scale, based in sunny Santa Barbara California, makes a cloud management platform that provides greater control over the cloud and makes it easy for companies to begin to migrate applications to the cloud or start building new ones there. See what Michael has to say…

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Some of the stuff Michael discusses:

Right Scale focuses on three things: 1) Automation, 2) Providing a library of cloud ready solutions, 3) doing all this in an open and transparent way that allows portability among cloud platforms.
How Right Scale came to be. Their founder was teaching a class at UCSB about how to build an ecommerce site. Amazon granted him some free compute time to use in his class. He realized he needed a framework for managing and monitoring the classes usage, he also realized there was a business to built around this idea…
Where Right Scale will be putting its efforts in the up coming year:
- Supporting more cloud platforms as the come online
- Increasing their partner program and their cloud-ready solutions
- Increasing support for enterprise level editions and features e.g. security and compliance, user control, billing, metering…

Extra-Credit reading:

Right Scale part 1: Mickos joins and control moves up the stack
Right Scale part 2: Why the Cloud? Apple Fanboys and server suffrage

Pau for now…

Imprisonment or Independence in the Data Center … Your Choice

Dell-Jennifer G — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:50:00 GMT

I never feel like I get enough sleep … fighting to get six to seven solid hours in every night. However, my stresses are NOTHING compared to the noise and pressure IT admins, CIOs and CTOs deal with. Just look at our industry. From what I’ve read and learned so far, it seems Cisco and HP want customers to rip out their current hardware, software and solutions, and start “fresh” with their Unified Computing System (UCS) and BladeSystem Matrix offerings. Correct me if I’m wrong about that, but I still have to ask -- what’s their motivation? Think about it, why would they insist on something so disruptive especially in a time when customers are fighting to thrive with restricted budgets?

The bottom line in my opinion is this: locking your company into an infrastructure means a locked-in revenue stream for the provider and lack of choice and flexibility for you.

This is incredibly frustrating. It shouldn’t be novel to do the right thing for customer FIRST and make money second. Folks are dealing with legacy hardware and limited budgets (in most cases) with an intense desire to virtualize and do something called “the cloud,” whatever that means to them. That’s enough to digest without having to consider that everything they’ve done up to this point might have been a waste of time and money.

Dell thinks there’s another way, a way where you don’t have to eat your own young to thrive and stay competitive.

First, we’re open. We’ve figured out how to get you where you’re going, specifically with virtualization, using most of what you’ve already invested in.

Second, we’re pragmatic. (pause for smirk on overused marketing word) We give you answers to IT problems now, today, just in case you don’t feel like waiting on promises that no one has proven or deployed.

Finally, we’re end-to-end. We already offer first class products at each step of the fully virtualized solution, including servers, storage, networking, desktop and the cloud, instead of specializing in only one part of the data center and trying our hand at new businesses.

This week at VMworld, we announced two new partnerships that strengthen our open, pragmatic and end-to-end approach. Brocade expands its 10-year relationship with the Dell family to provide enhanced leadership of next-generation data center networking with 10/40/100GbE, Security, iSCSI, FCoE and Converged Enhanced DCB Ethernet. These are in addition to our Brocade FC switches.

But we’re covering more than just the networking side of investment protection. We’re also partnering with Scalent Systems to make heterogeneous, virtualized environments portable for easier disaster recovery and higher availability. Now, you’ll no longer have to redefine your physical storage and network connections each time you need to move whole hypervisors, physical applications, workloads or virtual machines (VM). All of this can be done NOW with your existing technologies and future flexibility to purchase and use what you need to customize your infrastructure.

This is just the beginning. Folks like The Register, eWeek and ChannelWeb are already talking, and we’ll hit the streets a few times this fall with more info. In the meantime, ask some hard questions. The next time you find yourself sitting in the big, leather chair being entertained by the “latest and greatest” buzz solution, make sure it doesn’t end up stinging you.

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.

Design the Ideal Data Center

DELL-Matt M — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:26:00 GMT

In the 2002 movie, Minority Report, Police Chief John Anderton, played by Tom Cruise, manipulates data and images on massive computer screens to prevent crimes before they happen in the "pre-crime" department. Pretty cool concept and compelling visuals.

Imagine if you could enter a virtual data center and manipulate 3D images to create the most power-efficient, cost effective data center for your business. Now you can do it, and its

not science fiction with an interactive Web experience. Enter the Intel Dell Data Center 360 Tour- a new website from Dell and Intel that let's you walk through various ways to get more out of your data center.

Recently there has been expansive growth in data centers to keep pace with the need for data management and the demands of an ever-more connected workforce. With this growth comes the increased need for electricity and space, which pose environmental, energy and economic challenges that IT must solve within the data center environment. Optimizing the data center forces a business's IT department to make important decisions about which technology they wish to deploy in their data centers. As a result of these new business problems, now - more than ever - IT has been charged with maximizing the value of the most expensive real estate in their corporation: their data center.

Take a virtual walk through our new website to learn ways to address the most pressing topics: power and cooling, virtualization, server strategy, new and emerging technologies, and data center management. The virtual tour not only lets you explore the data center, but to take a deep-dive into its components and gain a full understanding of how they function within the larger system. We've included tools like ROI and energy calculators, white papers and online resources to help you plan the ideal data center.

There’s a lot to learn from taking a quick tour of the data center. Be like Tom Cruise and solve the problems before they exist.