Inside Enterprise IT : Industry

Virtualization Déjà Vu

Dell-Jennifer G — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:15:00 GMT

I remember riding in the car which a bunch of teenagers a few months ago when the Seether song “Careless Whisper” came on the radio. They loved it - so edgy, such a great sound. Ugh, really? Had they never heard of Wham? George Michael? I’d like to forget the 80s sometimes, too, but please. How could those kids think that song was an original? Don’t even get me started about Limp Bizkit covering “Faith” … blasphemy.

It happens in music, and it happens in IT -- and it appears to have happened this week.

The recent VCE announcement from Cisco, EMC and VMware sounds very familiar, a lot like the Business-Ready Configurations for Virtualization (also known as vPOD) Dell’s been doing all year.

Their “IT flexibility and lowering the cost of computing” message – yeah, doing that since March. If the popular saying “imitation is the best form of flattery” held true, these three companies would have also leveraged Dell’s passion for customer choice. But they didn’t. Instead, they seem to be focused on locking customers into a proprietary stack of technology. Customers don’t like that. That kind of situation could easily turn into a couple of million dollars.

Fortunately, Cadence Design Systems will never have to worry about that. Check out how they used Business-Ready Configurations to save about $2.7 million in physical-hardware cost. Using Dell’s run books Cadence expects to double the speed at which they deploy VMs to roughly 200 per month.

As we continue to integrate existing and new partners into the configs (EMC, Brocade, Juniper, Scalent), customers will find it even easier to deploy a customized, virtual environment start to finish.

Where is Milli Vanilli these days, anyway?

Cloud goes big in Japan (or at least at KDDI)

DELL-Barton G — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:43:00 GMT

I was scrolling through my blog reader and came across a post by Dave Rosenburg that piqued my interest: “KDDI chooses 3 Terra for cloud infrastructure.” Having lived in Japan many moons ago I’m always interested in getting updates on what's happening in tech over there and since this involved the cloud, I was doubly piqued.

Gaijin Clouds gathering

Turns out that KDDI, the number 2 telecom provider in Japan (which makes them pretty humongous) has not only become a cloud provider as of late but have gone with gaijin technology to do so. KDDI’s recently launched “KDDI Cloud Server Service” is powered by 3Tera’s Applogic cloud compute platform. According to the 3Tera press release:

Initial offerings include virtual systems and virtual private data centers run at the KDDI Telehouse domestic data centers. This allows KDDI to offer both Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as a-Service solutions, where customers can run their existing applications on the IT platform or use KDDI’s prepared applications to significantly lower their initial investment and operational costs.

As Dave points out in his blog, its interesting not only to see a Japanese company embrace the cloud but using outside technology to do so.

KDDI has made a big step forward, it will be interesting to see what the uptake is like.

Fun facts to know and tell: The word for cloud in Japan (kumo) is the same word for spider (kumo). Now the characters used for both are different and the Japanese use the English word “cloud” when talking about cloud computing but still, I’m looking forward to getting the chance to present on cloud computing in Japan and make some bad pun involving the two. Corny? Yes, but that’s how I roll.

Pau for now….

Corporate Agility is Within Your Reach

DELL-Angela Y — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:00:00 GMT

Agility is a good characteristic for companies to have, particularly in today’s uncertain market. Companies that can move quickly to adapt to changing market conditions have a competitive advantage over those that can’t.

Unfortunately, agility is often perceived as a luxury. Too often, we think of agility in terms of final-state: complete interoperability of elegant systems and processes – requiring years of work and significant investment. In reality, the optimal level of agility for your company in today’s environment may be closer than you think.

Consider the average person’s approach to physical agility and general fitness. We all need regular exercise and a healthy diet, but many of us struggle when we think about the lifestyle change required to be in great shape. We hear that we need 60 minutes of exercise a day, five days a week, with a mix of cardio and strength training. We hear that we should eat only whole grains, cut out processed food, and we’re told that a “serving” of anything is about a third of the size of what most of us consider a normal portion. If you are not following these and other guidelines, the changes you’d need to make to be in optimal health can seem overwhelming – and prohibitive. As a result, many folks end up taking no action at all.

It’s too bad, because there is value in even 10 minutes of exercise a day, or in simply cutting out sugary drinks, or in a variety of other small changes. Small lifestyle tweaks like these can improve how we feel and how we function day to day. Similarly, improvement in a company’s agility need not require a massive business and technology transformation. Many improvements can be achieved without significant cost or disruption.

The most important step is to identify the goals of your agility play. I am a fan of Michael Hugos’ high-level approach described in this post with his formula for determining business agility -- he speaks of agility in terms of profitability. If your company can consistently earn profits that are two to four percent higher than market average, the assumption is that your company is adapting quickly to changing customer demands and market factors.

For example, if your company plans to maximize profitability by focusing on high-margin offerings to your customers, you need to build a capability to support an ever-changing portfolio of high-margin products as the market evolves and the margins shift. So what needs to happen in your environment in support of this capability? You might charter a cross-functional team to identify and update constraining technology and processes, or you might spin up a project or two to reduce prohibitive complexity in the foundation of your IT environment, or you might offer streamlined collaboration tools.

While there are many options to consider, remember that not all processes will need to be rationalized, and not all technology complexity will need to be removed from your environment before your agility increases – baby steps optimized to support the relatively narrow task at hand will allow you to be agile in the way your company requires to maximize profits as the market shifts.

It’s the corporate equivalent of committing to 10 pushups a day during tank-top season.

Think about where small changes and investments can make a big difference to your corporate agility, and I’ll do the same. Let me know if you've got other suggestions that worked at your company.

Meanwhile, I’m going to lace up my walking shoes and take a few trips around the block.

Dell’s OEM Division and The New PowerEdge 11th Generation Servers

DELL-Franklin F — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 12:41:00 GMT

Since 1995, I’ve had the pleasure to participate in the growth of Dell from a relatively small computer start-up to one of the largest technology providers in the world. What a ride it’s been!

In 2001, I joined Dell's Industry Solutions Group (ISG), typically referred to as the OEM Group within Dell. It’s been ten years since our group began customizing hardware and providing unique services to OEM customers who use standard Dell hardware in their offerings. Last week, my colleague Bruce Eric Anderson, introduced me in a post he wrote on Google's new search appliance. Google is one of our many customers and represent some of the topics that I’ll be writing about here on Inside Enterprise IT.

As a Systems Consultant, I’ve assisted hundreds of product managers, engineers and developers create hardware appliances for their solution. I’ve helped them manage through hardware transitions, and, I’ve informed them about the future of Dell hardware solutions so they could be prepared for all the improvements that come with the advancements of technology.

This past March, Dell released the first of its 11^th generation of PowerEdge servers based on Intel’s XEON 5500 series of CPUs, the PowerEdge R610, R710 and T610. These truly innovative servers, along with the recently released PowerEdge R410 and T410, incorporate many improvements driven specifically by our OEM customers. I have seen several generations of PowerEdge servers marketed as appliances by our customers, and every generation has been consistently more reliable, stable, and feature-appropriate than its predecessor.

We continuously listen to the needs of our customers and use that information to improve the products and services that help them achieve their market goals more effectively and efficiently.

So, I'm happy to be able to share my industry observations with you here and hope that you'll let me know your thoughts and feedback. If you want to reach me directly with questions, you can ping me at franklin_flint at Dell (dot) com.

The Case For Greener IT Procurement

DELL-Bruce Eric — Tue, 12 May 2009 13:19:00 GMT

You can't read an issue of BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal or other major business publications without reading about "green IT." The same goes for IT-oriented outlets like Cnet, InformationWeek and eWeek.

The industry has come to realize that not only is consuming less energy good for the environment but it is also good for your company's bottom line. But how do you select an IT vendor while keeping an eye on these issues?

Dell recently commissioned Forrester Research to produce a study devoted to helping IT organizations improve one of their cornerstone processes — IT procurement. They researched and analyzed the state of green IT procurement, focusing on criteria to evaluate suppliers' overall sustainability policies and practices. While Forrester drew upon their years of extensive research in green IT, they also conducted 30 in-depth interviews with industry consortia, environmental NGOs, and a several internal stakeholders at Dell. Additionally, they conducted in-depth interviews with enterprise-class customers in North America and Europe (note that none of these companies were identified or selected by Dell and are not necessarily Dell customers.). Forrester spoke with IT practitioners at these organizations to understand if and how they are incorporating green criteria into their evaluations and selections of IT systems and IT suppliers.

The study shows that IT procurement will be a significant point of leverage for companies looking to improve the sustainability of their computing infrastructures. Forrester points out in the study that "Buyers struggle with this in part because there are no standard metrics and decision criteria that enable IT organizations to assess the green credentials of IT vendors."

From the report, I've pulled five suggestions on how companies can structure their request-for-proposal (RFP) documents. The report goes into great detail on suggested weighting for each of these areas and how to assess them.

Corporate environmental governance. These criteria are designed to illuminate a tech vendor’s overall commitment to sustainability by examining its goals and the broad processes it has in place for measuring and reporting progress toward those goals.
Corporate operations. These criteria focus on how aggressively a supplier is tackling the environmental impact of its own internal facilities and operations.
Supply chain. This includes a couple of crucial criteria that examine how a vendor is managing the environmental practices of its suppliers.
Stakeholder engagement. These criteria look at how proactive and participatory a vendor’s environmental programs are. They ask about a company’s engagement with important stakeholders, including customers, employees, and the rest of the IT industry.
Design for environment. This section focuses on how the supplier translates its sustainability practices into the products and services that it delivers to customers.

You can read a summary of the report here or if you'd like to download as a .pdf to send to your procurement teams, click here.

Rage Against the Laptop Machine

DELL-Jeremy B — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 13:00:00 GMT

Back in February, I wrote a piece about a survey that Dell had commissioned from the Ponemon Institute regarding laptop security.

Personally, I find these surveys kind of dry and pretty straight-forward. Of course we had to cover our bases to get scientific survey data, but we wanted to get a little more personal and really dig in to find out what people – like you and me – are doing to put data at risk. And when I say risk, I don’t mean just prying eyes, viruses, malware, etc. Data can be destroyed by a careless drop, a latte spilled on the keyboard or as we found … physical violence.

In our study, we asked IT professionals, “What are the most common causes of physical damage to laptops?” Expected answers came back from the IT pros: accidental drops, food and liquid spills or “not protecting the laptop while traveling.”

But the most interesting to me was the fourth option: “Employee inflicted damage because of anger and frustration.”

Let’s take a look at the numbers:

An astounding 31 percent of Brazilian IT professionals said that the most common cause of physical damage to a laptop is due to frustrated or angry employees;
A gut-busting 35 percent of Mexican IT professionals reported the same;
Apparently the French and German IT leaders have it a little better than their Brazilian and Mexican counterparts with 19 percent and 21 percent (respectively) saying that the most common cause of physical damage is due to angry or frustrated employees;
13 percent of the U.S. IT contingent we surveyed reported that angry or frustrated employees damage laptops, while the U.K. bested all the countries surveyed with only 6 percent of those polled reporting the same. (I guess the brits are always cool under pressure :)).

I have to admit, I sometimes daydream of throwing my system off the interstate bridge that is near the office. I was quite surprised, however, to see the statistics – they’re staggering.

Maybe we’ve found a new market for our fully rugged Latitude E6400 XFR or the semi-rugged ATG? Seems to me that the premium a customer would pay for a rugged system would work itself out when employees aren’t idle waiting for a replacement laptop or a fix from the IT staff.

There are other results from the survey as well as a video that we shot with the namesake of the Ponemon Institute here.

Dell PowerEdge R610 Server Takes Editor's Choice Award

DELL-Bruce Eric — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 17:33:00 GMT

"HP and IBM should be very afraid - Dell’s latest PowerEdge R610 - featuring Intel's new 'Nehalem' Xeon 5550 - sets new standards for rack server design."

This is the headline I read recently from this week's review of Dell's new Xeon 5500 (Nehalem)-based server by U.K.-based IT Pro. The review, which you can read in it's entirety on their site here, focused on much more than just the processor this system happens to utlise.

"The R610 has a keen eye on virtualisation, but also delivers reduced power demands and vastly improved management features with centralisation high on the agenda. The new servers also have a Lifecycle Controller, which provides features such as recording firmware versions, build level audits and options to transplant the local server’s settings to others.

Stacking up the R610 alongside the lab’s PowerEdge 1950 and you can see the front panel has been completely redesigned. The new LCD display offers a keypad for setting the remote management network address along with views of power consumption and temperatures."

The reviewer, Dave Mitchell, also praises Dell's design efforts with this system and the attention our engineers had in regard to cooling and fan modules. He says, "We were amazed at how quiet the R610 was during testing as we had to turn off most of the other systems in the lab before we could even hear it."

We're obviously quite proud of our 11th generation of PowerEdge servers and hope that our customers are pleased with them as well.

I'd like to invite you to join us for a technical discussion on Tuesday, April 14 at 1pm (central time) for a deep-dive with the engineers that were responsible for these systems. Click over to the Dell Enterprise Tech Center to join us for that discussion.

Dell is #1 Green Technology Brand Among IT Buyers

albert_esser — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:15:00 GMT

Dell has made aggressive strides with the "greenness" of our enterprise products and solutions in an effort to help our customers meet their environmental and cost goals. Our hard work is paying off...

According to a recent GreenFactor study released by Strategic Oxygen and Cohn & Wolfe, Dell is the number one green technology brand among IT buyers. Strategic Oxygen surveyed more than 3,500 enterprise IT decision makers, including CXOs, CIOs and IT Managers, in 11 different countries. Take a look at Lionel’s Direct2Dell post for a bit more context on the topic.

While we're happy to see the industry taking notice of our efforts, our work isn’t finished yet. We're still helping customers find their hidden data centers by focusing on IT productivity; we just released new infrastructure products that help reduce IT complexity and cost while improving power and cooling in the data center; and finally, we're working on our next generation of enterprise products and technologies that will continue to set new standards for energy efficiency. Time to get back to work!

Cisco Blade Server Misses the Mark

DELL-Rick Be — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Virtualization is undoubtedly a hot topic in the industry, especially today. After much anticipation, Cisco finally announced its “Project California.” As expected, Cisco launched its Unified Computing System (UCS), a blade server appliance designed for virtualization.

There has been a lot of discussion about what this means for Cisco’s partners in the virtualization server market. Are we partners? Are we competitors? Yes and yes. Dell continues to have a strategic networking partnership with Cisco to provide comprehensive solutions to our customers – today’s news does not change this. Am I worried that Cisco’s new appliance will take away business from Dell? Not at all.

We’ve seen this before. Companies bring to market solutions that address a narrow population of customers or a single IT issue. While Cisco is a leader in the networking space, the server market is a very different ball game. CIOs aren’t looking for proprietary, appliance-like products like UCS because they drive up TCO and create more complexity. This is where Cisco has missed the mark.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the excitement about virtualization that Cisco’s news has generated is great. This is a technology that has revolutionized business computing and I am particularly passionate about it. It seems, however, that Cisco is a bit confused about what customers want and need from virtualization solutions.

When I am talking with customers, there are common themes that come up about what businesses want:

Options and open standards – Flexibility is key to long term survival in today’s economy and this is what Dell delivers better than anyone else. Companies need more from a supplier than specialized, high-priced solutions. Businesses are looking for the whole package – a technology partner that can help them address and manage their large data sets, edge of the network workloads and everything else.
Better total cost of ownership – Customers expect that innovation in IT will be focused on lowering the cost of operations WITHOUT significantly raising the price for the hardware.
Simple management – Customers need the ability to manage their hardware locally. This is not possible with HP’s Virtual Connect –unless you have a 100% HP data center. And it does not appear to be possible with Cisco blades.

Dell’s strategy to simplify IT resonates with CIOs because it helps their organizations reclaim the most valued business resources: people, time and money. You will see exciting news from Dell in the coming months. Soon, we will introduce our totally redesigned Nehalem-based 11^th Generation PowerEdge virtualization servers. And you will also see us expand out partnerships to offer even more options for business looking to build open, flexible and powerful virtualized environments. Stay tuned.

HP Storage Announcement – Trying to Catch Up, Still Not There

DELL-Greg W — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 20:47:00 GMT

Yesterday, HP announced a refresh to their EVA storage line, which sounds new to those who haven’t been following the evolution of storage solutions over the last few years. For those in the business, it is seen for what it is: an attempt to catch up to what Dell and others have been doing for some time now. It is an attempt because, while the “new” EVA arrays have added some additional features – some that Dell has had for almost three years – they are still noticeably missing many that customers are looking for to help solve their storage problems and simplify their IT.

Catch up:

4Gbit back-end – Dell/EMC has 2 generations and almost 3 years of experience with end-to-end FC4 support;
Support for flash drives – Dell/EMC arrays have supported for more than 6 months;
Support for RAID 6 – Dell/EMC added RAID 6 support on CX3 arrays – the previous generation.

Still not there:

Increased capacity, ports and cache that doesn’t approach the levels available on Dell/EMC arrays: 960 drives, 32 ports, 32GB cache;
No ability to add additional ports or new network technologies like FC8 and 10Gbit iSCSI to an existing array;
No native support for iSCSI – only through an expensive FC-to-iSCSI bridge;
No data-in-place upgrades from previous generations of arrays;
No native thin-provisioning ability like what is available on Dell/EMC and Dell EqualLogic arrays;
No support for low-power SATA;
No announced support for drive spin down.

In today’s environment, features that save money or extend a product’s useful life are essential. Dell includes them because we listen to customers who tell us how they need to extend the life of their storage, consolidate it on intelligent SAN platforms and manage it more easily as their businesses grow and evolve. This is revolutionary and dynamic. We have been consistent in our approach since the beginning that we will continue to drive customer-centric innovation and make storage simple, capable and affordable. In the dynamic data center, Dell’s storage products will continue to help our customers grow.

We’ll also look forward to giving HP more targets to shoot for as they plan out their next generation of storage products a few years from now.