In last week’s blog post, we went through the deployment cycle for new infrastructure, which can take around 134-174 days and 450+ working hours; plus, there are risks and errors that can occur during each step. Dell’s solution – vStart – offers a more rapid, low-risk approach for our customers needing to deploy infrastructure quickly for virtualization and private clouds.

Over the past few years, we’ve been able to help customers see faster results – both in the process and total cost of ownership of the product. One example is TS Tech, a customer who needed to deploy new ERP infrastructure for a disaster recovery configuration. Since the locations had small or no staff and had strict service level agreements, vStart was the right solution for them since it eliminated the company’s need to have in-house expertise and the infrastructure was set up quickly.

Other companies may also have limited staff or experience with deploying new infrastructure. One of the great aspects of vStart is it’s like having a complete engineering team at your disposal, who has everything ready just when you need them. Our engineering team recently wrote a whitepaper to help our customers understand what value they add to vStarts (Global Solutions Engineering Value Adds for Reference Architectures and vStarts). Some of the key call outs are:

  • Solution Design: Maximize redundancy, separation of LAN and iSCSI SAN traffic, separation of multiple LAN traffic types, requirements for integration into an existing data center, lifecycle management
  • Solution Development: Taking best practices from each of the solution components into account; Focusing validation efforts on implementing customer specific use cases and design details
  • Solution Packaging and Deployment: Continuing engineering’s role after design, integration and validation phases; For example, developing documentation like our newest reference architecture whitepapers.

To learn more, go to Dell.com/vstart