Storage Hardware

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.

Virtualization has become a fully mainstream idea, talked about in circles from the IT admin all the way up to the CEO’s office, but there are still a lot of people out there that I talk to that just have their toes in the water, or are waiting to start or to expand their virtualization efforts.

If you aren’t fully tuned into this concept, virtualization can provide many benefits to organizations for increasing availability, enhancing disaster recovery, reducing costs around equipment and management, and more.  A key component to getting the most out of virtual server deployments is utilizing shared storage like a storage area network or SAN.

Just like consolidating your servers, consolidating your storage on a SAN can help enable better availability and data protection as well as helping reduce management costs.  We have made it one of our goals to simplify and accelerate your virtualization deployments by providing information, products and services to help our customers understand, scope, deploy and get the most out of their virtualization efforts.

We’re doing it again today by announcing enhancements to our CX4 storage arrays and networking products, like a high port count 1GbE blade switch, a 10GbE blade pass through I/O module, a 10GbE blade mezzanine card and 1GbE quad port blade mezzanine cards, and services that better enable consolidation and virtualization.

Our Dell/EMC CX4 storage arrays now support 10Gbit iSCSI (10GbE), along with the already supported 1Gbit iSCSI, 4Gbit Fibre Channel, and 8Gbit Fibre Channel, all on one array.  The additional bandwidth from 10GbE can enable support for more virtual machines and reduce the number of connections needed from server to storage.  The CX4 has also been enhanced with Virtualization Aware Navisphere, a feature that simplifies storage in virtual environments through automatic discovery of virtual machines and VMware ESX servers, end-to-end virtual-to-physical machine mapping, and advanced search for instant virtual machine discovery.

All this is happening at a great time as we are getting geared up for vmworld next week in San Francisco. You can check out my upcoming booth theatre presentation on the new CX4 capabilities by clicking here.

We hope that if you are there, you’ll participate in some of the many things we have planned to help better inform and educate you on virtualization options.

If you’re not, you can follow @Dellatvmworld on Twitter or check out Dell’s Virtual Tradeshow Booth. Also tune in for Andrew Gilman’s blog this week on all the things we’ll be doing at the show, including live technical demonstrations and in-booth white boarding sessions with our experts that can help you take the next step to improve and simplify your IT.

So says PC Pro Magazine in a recent review of the product. Out of a total of a possible six stars, the reviewer gives the PS4000E five stars saying it "delivers enterprise performance to mid-sized businesses."

The reviewer also says this of the product: "Dell's latest member of the EqualLogic family of IP SAN appliances, the PS4000E, aims to offer a more affordable alternative for medium-sized businesses. Not only does it deliver an impressive range of features but it could be one of the fastest appliances in its class."

Building on the momentum of multiple positive product reviews for Dell's PowerEdge R610 server, this week we also chalked up another editorial award in the U.K. in IT Pro's review of the the Dell EqualLogic PS6000 storage array review.

The reviewer, Dave Mitchell, had this to say about the product: "Acquiring IP SAN specialists EqualLogic early last year gave Dell a solid range of enterprise solutions that has enabled it to compete on an equal footing with the established names in the network storage market. It hasn’t sat still either and in this exclusive review we look at the new EqualLogic PS6000XV, which offers an extensive range of features and more than a few new ones as well."

Take a look at the very lengthy and thorough review and decide for yourselves.

Data deduplication is a topic being asked about by our customers, and being discussed in the media, more and more. Would you like to know Dell’s take on it?

In the video below, Darren Thomas, vice president and general manager of Dell's storage business, discusses Dell’s view on the future of this technology and what we are doing to help deliver solutions to meet your data management needs. (If you'd like to download the slides in this video, they are available on Dell's Slideshare account here.)

We are announcing enhancements to our deduplication portfolio, both in services to help you understand holistically how you might benefit from de-duplication, as well as in products that help address your storage challenges. That's the conversation should be about -- how you can best solve your problems related to data growth, protection and access.

Dell views deduplication as a feature of storage, one that may help you optimize your investments in data management. However, it's not the only one to accomplish this goal. Our view is that deduplication it is not, by itself, a solution.

Deduplication can be implemented in different ways, whether through dedicated appliances or through integration into existing areas, such as in backup software.

Dell's view is that an integrated approach -- a feature of your software -- provides the greatest benefits to you. In this way, deduplication becomes ubiquitous across many aspects of the data path, from applications through operating systems and backup, where it is focused today. We are helping to drive this evolution.

Before you can decide which approach to take to optimize your storage, though, you need to understand your unique needs and environment. Dell deduplication services can help. Our services teams can assess your needs, provide recommendations and implement solutions, whatever they may be – instead of just figuring out how to make a single approach work.

For more information on deduplication, I'd encourage you to take a look at www.dell.com/deduplication.

And if you have a more technical focus or appetite, I invite you to join us next week at Dell TechCenter for a live chat on this topic.