Storage

Ziff-Davis Enterprise Contributing Editor Steve Kovsky recently interviewed Dell's Anthony Dina on Dell's recent virtualization announcements and their ability to speed up ROI for enterprise data centers. In the interview, Anthony describes how Dell’s new approach emphasizes quicker returns and better measurement of each customer’s ROI.

Take a look.

I won't cover it all here but be sure to click over to our blogging mothership, Direct2Dell, to read about Dell's Fast Track to Efficiency, the theme for Dell's announcement of a slew of new servers, a cool new EqualLogic array for small business and remote offices, and quite a few different services.

We'll also be hosting a webcast today with a number of Dell executives outlining the importance of these announcements and the impact to our customers. Following that webcast, my colleagues at Dell TechCenter will be hosting a live technical chat.

Take a look.

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.

Here at Dell we’re getting excited about heading out next week to EMC World in Orlando.

We have a bunch of great things going on, and I wanted to share them so that you can make your plans.

For those of you that can’t be there, you can still follow what is going on by checking in here through the week and by following me on Twitter and Dell_Storage on Twitter and becoming a fan of Dell Storage on Facebook.

In addition, besides the myriad learning opportunities, EMC has some very cool things planned for social media involvement through their bloggers lounge.

I really enjoy the chance to get out and talk to our customers, potential customers, partners, colleagues and industry experts, so stop by our booth to check out the servers, storage and networking gear. You can also learn about Dell solutions in our short technology and solution presentations or in our two full EMC sessions, enter for a chance to win either a Dell Latitude E6400 notebook or Inspiron Mini 10 netbook, get your questions answered, tell us what we can do to help you, or just chat.

Details, details, details….

• Dell Booth #215 – the one with the big blue signs
• Dell sponsored full EMC sessions:

1.  
   1. Optimizing servers and storage for Oracle DSS workloads (Wednesday, May 20 from 9:30 to 10:30AM)
   2. Complete Virtualization Optimization… Servers, Storage, Networking, and Management (Wednesday, May 20 from 11 to 12PM)

• Dell short (10-15 min) sessions on technology and solutions in our booth theatre – each session (listed below, click to enlarge and print out) you attend provides an entry for a chance to win either a notebook or netbook.

When I talk to customers about storage challenges and technologies, it is always interesting to get their thoughts on one of the areas that has gotten a lot of attention over the last couple of years: flash or solid state drives (SSD).

Invariably, this discussion’s first stop is “those things are ridiculously expensive, right?”

Thankfully, the discussion is moving past this initial reaction and looking at SSD as an entirely different beast that should be evaluated, not in a $/GB comparison with spinning hard drives, but in other more meaningful and relevant ways.

This article by Storage Switzerland does a great job calling out the benefits of SSD versus traditional spindle-based hard drives for performance sensitive applications, how you might think differently about comparing the costs of implementing and managing SSDs, and that you may find it makes sense to do it now. 

I also recently saw another article by Bert Latamore on Wikibon that provides additional insight by looking at the lifetime cost of flash versus traditional hard drives. I look forward to seeing more discussions like these that help organizations solve storage challenges by thinking about new, more meaningful ways to compare various technologies in  an “apples-to-apples” way.

Let me be clear, SSD isn’t for everyone yet, but it can make sense for a lot more people than are considering implementing them now – if they were evaluating SSD in a new way. 

Leave a comment below with your thoughts, and follow me on Twitter for more thoughts and conversations on storage, green IT, conservation and more.