Enterprise

Dell + Wyse + Citrix partnering to bring one great end to end desktop virtualization solution

Janet Diaz — Thu, 17 May 2012 16:42:00 GMT

Dell, Wyse and Citrix are trendsetters in the desktop virtualization marketplace with a proven track record of delivering on products that meet customers evolving needs. Today we are pleased to announce that we have partnered to bring together two reference architectures that combine Dell’s commitment to desktop virtualization with the DVS Simplified and DVS Enterprise solution offerings. Wyse’s more than three decades of cloud client expertise along with Citrix’s desktop virtualization prowess in the marketplace.

You will see in these reference architectures that with the pairings from these three companies we have created an end-to-end solution that will meet your desktop virtualizations needs.

Let’s begin.

Dell’s DVS Simplified appliance partnered with Wyse’s T10 Thin Client

Dell’s DVS Simplified Appliance utilizes Citrix VDI-in-a-Box VDI software to give you the ability to quickly deploy a desktop virtualization solution with a simplified management experience. This simplified wizard based management allows IT generalist to manage virtual machines where historically IT specialist or a team of consultants were needed. As you can imagine this key benefit can drastically drive down your IT workforce cost. These desktop virtualization benefits are further enhanced by the Wyse T10 thin client which gives you an unparalleled user experience brought to you by Wyse ThinOS.

The Wyse T10 thin client delivers a superb user experience and security features while still meeting your budget demands. It has been fully tested and validated with Citrix VDI-in-a-Box and is Citrix Ready certified. What does this mean for you? It means you can be insured that the combination of Dell’s DVS Simplified appliance, with Citrix VDI-in-a-Box and the Wyse T10 thin client are the perfect marriage if you are a small or medium sized business looking for a solution that is fast and easy to deploy that simplifies the management experience of desktop virtualization.

Some of the other great features and benefits that are in this reference architecture are:

DVS Simplified Appliance integrates factory installed software on pre-configured hardware
Citrix VDI-in-Box wizard-based setup and implementation cuts deployment time from quarters/months to weeks/days
The desktop virtualization management console centralizes IT control and requires no special expertise
Wyse’s ThinOS 7.1 allows you to boot and be logged into your secured network within seconds.
Wyse’s T10 built-in hardware media processor delivers smooth multimedia, bi-directional audio and flash playback performance
Both the Wyse T10 and DVS Simplified appliance have been fully Citrix Ready certified and support HDX technology. HDX technology delivers a “high definition” desktop virtualization user experience to end users for any application, device or network

You can download the DVS Simplified reference architecture here.

Dell’s DVS Enterprise offering with Wyse’s T10 Thin Client and Xenith Pro Zero Client

Dell’s DVS Enterprise offering gives you the maximum feature set, device integration and flexibility for desktop virtualization. DVS Enterprise is a solution that scales from 50 users to 50,000 users. Not only does it feature scalability options typically not seen in desktop virtualization offerings, it also features best in class hardware. Dell’s new 12G servers have dramatically reduced the cost per user. You can see up to 50% more users per server than the previous Dell DVS Enterprise solution. What makes this reference architecture more complete than ever is the combination of Wyse’s T10 Thin Client and Xenith Pro Zero Client which are both Citrix Ready certified. These two clients are the perfect complement for DVS Enterprise because they streamline the delivery of the Citrix infrastructure, are Citrix Ready certified and deliver exceptional performance utilizing Citrix HDX technology. The Xenith Pro is up to three times faster than competing devices which allows users to get an unparalleled multimedia experience without putting an unnecessary load on your servers. Some other features that you will see in the reference architecture are:

Wyse’s Xenith Pro powers on in just 6 seconds and goes from standby to on in 2 seconds
The Xenith Pro draws less than 14 watts of power in full operation
Plug-n-play operation with auto-discovery and zero configuration and hands off client management
Dell’s DVS Enterprise is readily expandable from a pilot to a large deployment
DVS Enterprise offers solution services to meet the exact needs of the enterprise. From on-site deployment and break fix services to training services.

You can download the DVS Enterprise reference architecture for this solution here.

As you probably guessed we are extremely excited to bring you two reference architectures that leverage three companies that are leaders in the desktop virtualization marketplace. With these two reference architectures Dell, Wyse and Citrix have partnered to bring customers a solution that is tailored for their needs.

Remember, for small and medium sized customers that want to enjoy the benefits of desktop virtualization, DVS Simplified with Citrix VDI-in-a-Box paired with the Wyse T10 is the right solution. And for large enterprise customers who need flexibility and scalability, DVS Enterprise with Citrix XenDesktop paired with the Wyse T10 thin client and Xenith Pro Zero Client, is likely the solution for robust demands.

If you want to take the first step into the realm of desktop virtualization, I suggest you check out the reference architectures or learn more at dell.com/desktopvirtualization.

Dell delivers density

Paul Steeves — Mon, 14 May 2012 15:25:00 GMT

Anyone managing a data center faces the difficult balancing act of delivering on continually increasing performance demands, handling the cooling issues that usually result from that, and yet staying inside already physically constrained energy resources. More and more they are turning toward high density computing as the answer and making it a central tenet of their infrastructure strategy.

While designing the PowerEdge 12^th generation servers, we heard from many customers wrestling with this same dilemma. That’s why density is featured throughout the new PowerEdge 12^th generation server portfolio - with some particularly dense models – like the 2-socket/ 1U R620 rack server, the new quarter-height M420 blade server and the one I’m writing about today, the new 4-socket/2U R820 rack server.

The PowerEdge R820 is designed in response to customers who told us they wanted the extra performance of a four socket server without compromising on efficient use of space and energy. The R820 is the first-to-market 4-socket server that uses the Intel Xeon E5-4600 product family, which has a 75% performance increase over the E5-2600 product family. Yet it also offers tremendous density with 48 DIMMS (a full 1.5 TB of memory), 7 PCIe Gen3 expansion slots and up to 16 internal drives, all in its compact 2U form factor. And new PowerEdge 12^th generation I/O options like a split backplane, dual RAID controllers, Express Flash PCIe SSDs, and the modular Select Network Adapter make it even more powerful.

R820 delivers great performance for data intensive applications and has the ability to rapidly scale to handle the spikes that occur in transaction based workloads. It makes an excellent database server and is especially well designed for dense virtualization usage. In fact, the R820 optimally supports up to 60% more virtual machine instances in the same space as HP’s closest similar 4-socket offering (the 4S/4U DL580 G7). Its density allows it to do this – the large memory footprint that supports more VMs and the extensive local storage and expansion slots that give those VMs all the resources they need to run at high levels of efficiency.

The R820 also has what it takes to be a great mainstream database server for mid to large size operations. It can support 129% more database orders per minute in half the space compared to an HP Proliant DL580 G7. It minimizes query wait times using its 32 processor cores, 1.5 TB of memory and improved CPU performance, and eliminates potential I/O bottlenecks with its Select Network adapter flexibility, split backplane, dual RAID and Flash-based storage (which lets it rapidly process in-memory data without “fetching” from an external disk).

“Using these servers, researchers will be able to generate research results faster than before.” MICHAEL FENN, High-Performance Computing Systems Administrator, Penn State University

And lastly, the R820 is an excellent option for High Performance Computing (HPC) shops looking for performance with density. It has both 216% better SPECfp performance and 269% better LINPACK performance than previous generation Dell 2 socket/2U servers.

And the R820 does all of this while delivering 50% better power usage per core (47W) than the previous generation PowerEdge R710 and 106% lower annual operational costs compared to the 2-socket/2U PowerEdge R720. Like all the servers in the PowerEdge 12^th generation portfolio, the R820 supports a Fresh Air compliant configuration that lets you operate at higher data center temperatures – in some cases completely avoiding cooling costs.

Customers wanted more power in less space. We listened. The PowerEdge R820 is a perfect example of the mantra that has been adopted for the 12^th generation servers; “Designed by you. Engineered by Dell.”

Twenty-four Hours in a Private Cloud with Dell and Microsoft

Gaurav Chand, Exec Dir Global Solutions — Thu, 10 May 2012 13:00:00 GMT

I am excited to announce Dell’s participation as a Platinum Sponsor at Microsoft’s “24 Hours in a Private Cloud” virtual event today, Thursday, May 10. This event is an awesome learning opportunity for organizations developing public and private cloud strategies.

Organizations have a lot of strategic cloud implementation options and opportunities, such as choosing a cloud technology, defining the mix of public and private clouds and preparing for cloud management. This event will provide a concise snapshot of the critical decision points and best practices and will be chock full of educational presentations and thought-leadership discussions with top cloud experts.

As a Platinum Sponsor, Dell will be an active contributor to the day’s events. Participants can join Dell for a 20-minute keynote, an AIM-Systems Center Demo and a breakout session showcasing our vStart solutions. We will be sharing our Practical Path to the Cloud, including:

How to Velocitize Virtualization with vStart
The advantages of Dell OpenManage Integration with Systems Center
Accelerating virtualization adoption with Dell AIM

We also encourage participants to visit us at the Dell Virtual Booth during the event to interact with Dell cloud experts and to learn more about Dell’s cloud solutions.

24 Hours in a Private Cloud starts NOW. You can register for the event here. Microsoft will also record the day’s events for those that are unable to attend or want to access the content after the event. Sign up here to watch recordings after the event.

The good news about disaster recovery planning – it’s not as hard as it used to be [Infographic]

Susmit Pal — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 14:00:00 GMT

Only 26% of healthcare facilities have a robust, tested disaster recovery plan, according to an article on Health IT Exchange. Not surprising, considering the wide variety of data types and applications involved – email, medical records, multiple diagnostic imaging PACS, financial processing.

But recovery planning can be critical to your facility’s survival. Disasters like Hurricane Katrina, the tornadoes in Missouri and the tsunami in Japan have shown that healthcare facilities are at risk. And patients depend on healthcare facilities to have their records, even in the wake of a disaster.

The good news is that recent advances in technology are making the process far simpler than it was even just two years ago. The ability to aggregate data from multiple sources into an intelligent storage platform — one that has built-in redundancy and data protection — has eliminated a lot of the labor and expense.

Cloud technology also can enable constant backup of your archives to a geographically remote location, which is much safer than tape backups stored nearby. And recovery via cloud can be fast, allowing a facility to be up again within hours.

An example is the Dell Cloud Clinical Archive, which allows you to aggregate data from PACS, EMRs and other applications and store it in a secure data warehouse. For the healthcare IT manager, a system like this is a fast and affordable approach to a robust disaster recovery plan.

So it’s time to quit procrastinating on disaster recovery. The best time to create and test your disaster recovery strategy is before the next disaster – which means now.

Embed This Graphic – Copy Source Code Below:

<a href="http://content.dell.com/us/en/healthcare/d/healthcare/dell-cloud-clinical-archive.aspx">Dell Cloud Clinical Archive</a> infoGraphic from Dell:<br /><"img src="http://en.community.dell.com//resized-image.ashx/__size/550x0/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-00-00-11/4377.DELL_5F00_DisasterRecovery_5F00_FA.JPG" alt="Dell disaster recovery infographic">

Introducing Dell’s New Offerings for Desktop Virtualization Solutions

Janet Diaz — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 13:45:00 GMT

Listening to customers and responding to their needs is at the core of what Dell does best. That statement is true across segments, products and solutions, and it has been cemented as one of the company’s competitive advantages.

Since Dell made a conscious shift into the Enterprise space, the Desktop Virtualization Solutions (DVS) team has been working extensively listening to customers and end users and developing the tools and technologies that will make them successful. We are strengthening our position in the desktop virtualization solutions space with end-to-end offerings that expand from the data center to the end point device and which are designed to help a wide range of organizations with light IT or complex IT environments implement virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

Today, we’re announcing the expansion of our portfolio of Desktop Virtualization Solutions with a number of new offerings targeted for light IT and complex IT environments. These solutions will help a full range of customers, from a small business entrepreneur to a multinational corporation, realize the benefits of desktop virtualization.

The new solutions include:

DVS Simplified – an easy, affordable, all-in-one desktop virtualization appliance for organizations with less complicated IT environments. This
solution is uniquely designed to remove traditional cost and complexity barriers associated with deploying virtual desktop infrastructure.
DVS Enterprise– it’s designed for organizations with more demanding IT environments and diverse end user requirements. It enables deployments starting with as few as 50 users and offers the flexibility to scale up to thousands of users.
Coming soon – DVS Simplified Desktop as a Service (DaaS) – it combines Desktone’s DaaS software platform and Dell’s global datacenters and service to provide quick, seamless deployment and management of VDI environments.

From small to medium to large businesses, from the simplest to the toughest IT needs, our Desktop Virtualization Solutions provide a full end-to-end response as part of our commitment to help customers solve their complex IT needs.

What do you think about these new solutions? Join the conversation with your questions and comments here. Discuss the DVS solutions with your customers and let us know what they think.

Deploying and Managing Today’s IT Workloads Part I

DELL-Marc St — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 19:22:00 GMT

Part I: Essential Elements of a Workload’s Life

“4-mation of air, fire, land and water” by Kolix

For more than two thousand years, humans used four elements– earth, water, air and fire—to explain, describe and measure the known universe. These essentials of life formed the foundation for all humankind and are still used today.

Similarly, IT organizations often use four elements – size, complexity, economic value and availability – to effectively deploy and manage today’s complex workloads. The simple definition of a workload-- defined as the amount of processing needed at any given time--has greatly evolved in recent years.

Size is based on the processor and threading requirements, memory consumption per workload, and I/O throughput or bandwidth needs.
Complexity arises in the way of disk capabilities and configuration, but also through the introduction of virtualization as a new infrastructure option for deploying workloads.
Economic value, while sometimes overlooked, is an imperative factor in the overall workload portfolio. This can span understanding the cost for the use of infrastructure, or chargeback, or as the foundation for understanding on-premise or off-premise options.
Availability is the final consideration and includes performance, service levels, user demand, and other business expectations for the application associated with the workload.

Let’s consider a typical collaboration workload, such as Microsoft Exchange, running in a large insurance company. With thousands of instances designed to support thousands of email users, we have workloads that test each of the four elements we outlined above.

First, size varies due to the number of mailboxes added or volume of emails per user. Next, complexity is introduced, because our example organization is going through a major virtualization initiative. So instead of our Exchange workloads running on dedicated physical hardware, we are running on a new shared resource environment. Then we have economics at play. Given that email is the lifeblood in many organizations, it’s often a tier one application and must be resilient and compliant to service levels. And as a result, high availability and application performance are essential given the difficulty of generating revenues when sales representatives can’t submit orders or field inquiries from customers.

Dell understands today’s business imperatives and is delivering new value to our customers through enterprise workload solutions. In talking with thousands of customers, we’ve focused our key tenets of value on helping organizations to:

Rely on a secure and compliant collaboration platform
Improve workforce productivity
Increase customer-facing time via a dynamic workplace
Save money, drive innovation and grow the business

For organizations that need to deploy and manage mission-critical collaboration workloads, Dell’s new PowerEdge 12^th generation servers help our customers run complex workloads more efficiently. We are working closely with Microsoft to provide joint delivery of hardware, software and professional services. We are also partnering with Oracle and Microsoft to deliver a portfolio of data warehousing and analytics solutions, as well as teaming with providers like Ansys, Synopsis, MathWorks, and CD-Adapco for high performance computing (HPC) and other research and development workloads. By increasing access for greater numbers of users, accelerating scientific results, and gaining faster access to data, Dell is delivering intelligent infrastructure and innovations to propel your business success.

Humankind now has an advanced understanding of earth, water, air and fire. Likewise, IT teams need to evolve their understanding around the size, complexity, economic value and availability of their workloads in support of organizational agility and efficiency goals in their data center.

Check back tomorrow, when we will focus on Dell’s solutions for managing complex workloads using VIS and vStart solutions.

Balancing capacity - demands of cloud computing and airlines

Matthew Mikell — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 15:00:00 GMT

If there’s a sector that understands seasonal swings, or balancing peaks and valleys of demand against its capacity, it’s likely the travel industry. Either through booking of holiday travel or checking departures at the onset of a storm, airlines constantly manage spikes of compute demand. One might see them as the perfect scenario for cloud!

Beyond our frequent flier points and mobile apps, I don’t believe any of us pay attention to how much goes into the journey that seamlessly incorporates the flight schedules, bookings, gates, fees, and bag transfers of multiple carriers.

In the case of one airline alliance, oneworld, there are 11 carriers spanning 850 airports in nearly 150 countries, 10,000 daily departures and a fleet of 2,500 aircraft. Imagine the complexity and diversity of data being gathered from each airline on seat availability, gate assignments from arrival/departure airport, and identifiers for 1m passengers across each leg and across each carrier. Collecting this data might be the ultimate challenge in application integration. Sharing this data, across carriers, may be the ultimate test for cloud integration.

Dell Boomi announced today work with oneworld, launching an IT hub (aka cloud) whereby all carriers can connect without having to exchange directly with each individual alliance partner. Each member forges single connection to the IT Hub in the cloud for data exchange with all the other airlines. Carriers see the value but getting into the alliance quickly without months or years of integration costs and the ability to easily make enhancements to their frequent flyer programs that register across member programs. Passengers, of course, see the value quickly with a better travel experience.

If airlines, who often compete with one another, can share a common cloud, maybe there is hope for other industries? With all their compute capacity, could we see an airline leverage their capacity as a cloud provider?

Dell Helps New Storage Customers Realize Efficiency with Attractive Trade-In Program

Gaurav Chand, Exec Dir Global Solutions — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 15:40:00 GMT

The Challenge: AccuWeather, needed to reduce its data center’s consumption of space, power and IT staff time. As the organization evaluated their needs for greater IT efficiency, they determined they need to transition from their EMC solutions.

Their solution: AccuWeather, deployed Dell EqualLogic PS arrays and PowerEdge blade servers because of the ease of installation and lower cost.

The Benefits: The Dell infrastructure enabled AccuWeather to service rapidly growing consumer demand, spend a significantly smaller amount of time on storage administration, and save five figures per year. In addition, AccuWeather was able to cut energy costs by 50 percent per Dell server blade and significantly reduce space requirements.

Dell recently announced a new storage trade-in program for organization that are currently using EMC and NetApp solutions, and are looking for something…a bit more efficient. The Dell Storage Swap program provides cash credits and attractive lease terms for customers wanting to upgrade to new Dell Compellent and EqualLogic storage arrays and retire certain EMC and NetApp systems. This program aims to help simplify the transition for customers by offering migration services and financial services leasing options.

The Storage Swap program is another way that Dell delivers end-to-end solutions that enable customers to better support their organizations and deliver the speed, efficiency and resiliency required in a rapidly changing world. As an additional part of the program Dell is offering to safely dispose of your retired IT equipment in an environmentally-friendly way, so there is no need to worry about whether your old storage arrays are going to be out there rusting in the elements…

Embracing Agility and Simplicity to Grow in Manufacturing

Bill Popp — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 16:32:00 GMT

Agility is a well-used term in the manufacturing industry. Agility, the ability to sense and respond to changes in the market, is critical for manufacturers to grow and succeed in an increasingly globalized and competitive world. At Dell, we help manufacturers with all aspects of their IT infrastructure to achieve this important capability and increase IT efficiency.

Dell recently partnered with Insteel Industries to help the steel manufacturer with a variety of improvements to its IT infrastructure. With Insteel’s transition to Windows Server 2008r2, Dell helped the organization set up a virtualized architecture which enabled Insteel to avoid purchasing new hardware in the transition. And to support their ERP system, Insteel transitioned from using PA-RISC platforms to Dell PowerEdge servers which will save Insteel around $80,000 in hardware maintenance over the next four years.

Additionally, after the organization finalized an important acquisition, Insteel chose to work with Dell for their transition. With Dell’s help, and with Insteel’s 24/7 production environment in mind, Insteel closed the acquisition on a Friday and had products shipping out of its new facilities’ ERP systems by Monday. On day one, new employees from the acquisition were set up with Latitude E6510 laptops, complete with access to the Insteel network.

Evident by these examples, Insteel truly values IT efficiency, and, in fact, the importance Insteel places on efficient technology solutions has helped the company become the largest U.S. manufacturer of steel wire reinforcing products.

“We look for a technology provider who can pretty much bring the complete solution to the table all at one time, and Dell was the natural choice for the business. The simpler we can keep our environment, the more easily our small staff can deploy packages, do operating system upgrades and troubleshoot problems. IT management is simplified and we feel like that gives us a competitive edge.” - Mark Coleman, Manager of Systems and Database Administration, Insteel Wire Products.

As complexity grows through globalization and customer demand rises for customized products, the need to simplify the manufacturing environment is becoming more and more important for manufacturers to maintain manageability and reliability. Insteel is just one of many manufacturing customers that utilize Dell and Dell Services to reach this desired level of simplicity. You can learn more about our manufacturing solutions at www.dell.com/manufacturing.

What does agility mean to your company? How do you prioritize IT efficiency? Comment here and let us know.

The next generation PowerEdge C6220: The radical results of listening

Steve Croce — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 19:10:00 GMT

There’s no doubt that data center hardware is the coolest and most innovative place to be in the computer industry right now. In the few short years since I’ve joined Data Center Solutions (DCS), we’ve used netbook processors to create servers the size of a hard drive. We’ve taken GPUs from the video gaming world and put them to work in high performance computing clusters for the oil and gas industry. Last year, we even dropped the entire Bing Maps Modular Data Center into an empty lot and had it operational in less than 60 days. It gets more interesting by the day, and it’s refreshing to see so many businesses open to radical new ideas in the data center.

Today I’m here to talk about the PowerEdge C6220. The real story behind our new server is about how these radical new designs mature and become staples of modern hyperscale data centers. This evolution is based purely on the feedback that we’ve received from our customers over the last five years. The 4-in-2U “Xanadu” shared infrastructure design started as our answer to a problem statement from one of the world’s largest search providers. The DCS team’s solution housed four independent servers in a 2U chassis. It was a radical departure from competing designs [see picture below left]. Five short years later, this form factor is now an industry standard. Compare the original Xanadu (upper pic) design with our new product, the PowerEdge C6220 (lower pic). There are a myriad of differences, both visible and not.

Xanadu 4-in-2U prototype

The New PowerEdge C6220

When we set out to design the follow-on to PowerEdge C’s most successful 4-in-2U product, the C6100, we started with you, the customer. What we heard was that we got the density and power efficiency of the C6100 right, but you wanted more. To answer, we’ve added support for processors with a higher thermal design point (TDP) than 95W (the limit on the C6100), while reducing the power consumption of chassis components by over 100W. You asked for the ability to flexibly configure each server sled individually and with the PowerEdge C6220 you will get it. In your feedback, you also asked us to make the system more manageable and serviceable. What you’ll find is that is that the new product has a more robust design that reduces service time by over 25%.

It’s been an honor to step into so many data centers these past few years and roll your feedback into our latest product, the PowerEdge C6220. Keep pushing us. Keep providing us feedback, and keep giving us new problems to solve in your data center. We’ll be there to listen every time. I know the PowerEdge C6220 will solve problems for you, and we look forward to working with you on whatever comes next.

For extra reading:

Check out the landing page for 12G servers
Learn about the PowerEdge C server series on Dell.com
Read The Register’s review of Dell’s new 12G servers, including the PowerEdge C6220
Link for all of Dell's 12th Generation server posts

Nuclear Data Explosion

Chad Andrews — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:00:00 GMT

We are on the verge of a nuclear data explosion. On Christmas day alone this year, 7 million combined Android and iPhones were activated, along with 240 million app downloads! The number of angry birds hurled that day must have been in the bizzilions.

Staying on top of industry trends like this is of course a key part of my job, and looking through recent data, I’ve uncovered ten stats that reinforce the idea that device proliferation, increased spectrum and rise in wireless subscriptions are leading to massive increase in data consumption:

1.2 billion apps were downloaded during the 2011 holiday weekend; December 25-January 1 (breakdown by country from TechCrunch) The U.S. accounted for nearly half of all downloads (509 million), followed by China (99 million) and then the UK (81 million). Then Canada, Germany, and France all came in at around 49 million.
IMS Research predicts 1 billion smartphones will sell in 2016, up from 420 million in 2011.
Ericsson predicts that there will be a combined eight billion mobile subscriptions in 2016, more than the total world population.
There are currently estimated to be 327.6 million active wireless customer connections in the U.S. The nation’s population is estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau to be roughly 312 million. This means that today there are now more active broadband tablets, cell phones and mobile devices than people in this country.
Smartphones and tablet computers will increase mobile Web traffic by 26 times by 2015.
Essentially, this stat breaks down to a 3x increase in data usage on 4G over 3G: Arieso, a mobile research firm based in Newbery, U.K., said users of the new iPhone 4S demand 276 percent more data for downloads and 320 percent more data for uploads than iPhone 3G users. Other non-Apple devices also use considerably more data than the iPhone 3G. For example, users of the 2011 HTC Desire S on the Google Android operating system demand 170 percent more data for downloads and 323 percent more data for uploads compared to the iPhone 3G.
Areas that comprise less than 1 percent of the Earth’s total land area will be the locations generating 60% of total mobile traffic.
In early 2011, there were 200 million plus views on YouTube mobile devices daily.
Worldwide digital content will grow 48% next year (2012) with over 90% of all data being unstructured. Source: IDC, 2012
Interesting video on growth of mobile: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aUQLIPdtg8

One of the stats I find most interesting is that 4G phone users chew up three times the data usage of 3G users. This suggests to me that as the speed of networks increases, consumers are more than willing to adapt behavior to consume more. With total number of smartphones expected to double by 2014, and spectrum increasing, it’s likely that we will see exponential rise in data that must be stored, organized, processed and served.

Bottom line: If your infrastructure is not designed to do more with less, you are going to have a very hard time staying above water, let alone remaining profitable. Dell is focused today on solving for this particular set of problems, with several solutions in our portfolio that address enterprise data needs, with a focus on video.

Have you come across an interesting mobile statistic recently? Please comment and share them with us here.

How cloud decentralizes our world (in a good way)

Rick Nucci--Boomi CTO — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:24:00 GMT

Recently I signed up for an online music matching service. If you aren’t familiar, these services basically make your entire music library available from the cloud, and sync it across all of your devices as well. One of the really useful things about such services is that they let you selectively download artists/albums/songs onto your computers/devices vs. automatically adding them.

This selective download capability got me thinking…why is it actually needed? The answer is obvious; you need to download your music so you can listen to it in places where you don’t have internet access. Planes, trains, and cars are some examples of places where you don’t get reliable, consistent, internet access. My home, however, is another story. I have excellent internet access. Despite this, prior to music matching, I was forced into an “on premise” music management process. Everything had to be stored on my home computer, and I had to manually plug each of my devices into the computer and manually choose what I wanted to sync over. The continued growth of my digital music and movies will very quickly fill up a 500GB hard drive, forcing me to play the “do I really watch/listen to this?” game over and over.

So after I setup music matching, I ran a few tests. I quickly realized that I could “delete” anything I wanted off my home computer, but when I did my music service would ask me if I wanted to keep it in the cloud. If I said yes, then it just meant that it would be streamed from the cloud vs. played locally, which is fine because I can stream from home as much as I want. But it was removed from my home computer storage, forever solving my ongoing need for local storage.

This is a great example of how the cloud decentralizes our worlds. In the pre-cloud days I had to think of my music library as one big centrally stored collection. It was up to me to back it up, buy more and more storage, move it around when I upgrade PC’s, you get the idea. Now with the cloud, all of that goes away, and the idea of “storage” means something totally different. Storage is now decentralized; downloaded fragments of my music library are scattered across my devices so that I can listen to them from places where I can’t get to the cloud.

There is a very similar phenomenon going on in the integration world. Old integration middleware applications that were built before the cloud existed were built with a centralized mindset. You would create these huge stacks of hardware/databases/queues/servers and run massive amounts of data through them. And they worked well, in the pre-cloud days, because the applications being integrated were within the same network. The cloud has now completely changed this paradigm. There is no one central place for IT anymore.

Between traditional data centers, private clouds, public clouds, PaaS, and SaaS, your IT landscape if officially decentralized. So then, must your integration strategy. While the centralization of development tools, administrative consoles, deployment and change management is more critical than ever, your integration “stack” must now be portable so that you can address integrations in all of the different environments you will contend with. By following this strategy, you will be approaching integration with a strategy that scales as your cloud adoption does.

How has the cloud decentralized your world?

Dell Networking at Dell Storage Forum 2012 in London

Larry Hart — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 23:05:00 GMT

The Dell Networking team is excited to take part this week in the first Dell Storage Forum London. Throughout the week, Dell will take customers and channel partners through the Fluid Data architecture with demonstrations of our flexible storage and networking platforms and highly scalable file systems.

Dell provides complete storage and networking solutions to store and access data at the highest levels of performance and efficiency. At Dell Storage Forum, we will showcase several of our new technologies designed for full compatibility with next generation storage infrastructures.

Next Generation Fibre Channel: As organizations evolve their data centers toward private cloud architectures, they need to consolidate, scale, simplify, and automate their IT resources in order to better serve the business. As business requirements evolve, Dell is helping these customers meet changing requirements by partnering with Brocade to deliver next generation Fibre Channel SAN solutions like the Brocade DCX 8510 Backbone and the Brocade 6510 switch.

The Brocade DCX 8510 Backbone is one of the industry’s most powerful SAN backbones, increasing business agility with new levels of scalability, performance, and reliability to support growing private cloud storage requirements. The Brocade 6510 switch is optimized for cloud environments while being simple and intuitive in operation. It can be readily deployed by large Enterprises or entry-level SAN customers.

Dell Force10: In Data Center Networking, we will be showcasing the Dell Force10 Z9000 and S60. For high density switching, flexibility and efficiency in your data center, the Z9000 delivers 32 ports of 40GbE in a 2RU form factor. By deploying the Z9000 in a distributed leaf-spine architecture, customers can improve their data center core architecture and eliminate bandwidth bottlenecks.

The Dell Force10 S60 is a high-performance 1/10 GbE access switch optimized for lowering operational costs at the network edge. As the use of bursty applications and services continue to increase, huge spikes in network traffic that can cause network congestion and packet loss also become more common. The S60 is equipped with the industry’s largest packet buffer (1.25 GB), enabling it to deliver lower application latency and maintain predictable network performance even when faced with significant spikes in network traffic.

Dell PowerConnect: With its new FCoE Transit capability, the Dell PowerConnect 8024 provides customers with the ability to converge their datacenters now or whenever their business demands it. Along with its blade counterpart, the M8024-k, the PowerConnect 8024 is an Ethernet switch for 10Gigabit throughput and can use FIP snooping to attach to an available converged data center network.

In addition to these product demonstrations, several sessions will be available so that attendees can learn how to get the most out of their storage infrastructure using the latest in Dell Networking.

Ethernet for Dell EqualLogic: Recommended Best Practices and Configuration
Dell Compellent Fibre Channel Storage Best Practices and Configuration
Next Generation Fibre Channel Solutions from Dell & Brocade
Dell EqualLogic Replication: Best Practices for Deploying Data Protection and Disaster Recovery
Ethernet for Dell EqualLogic: Strategies for Scaling the EqualLogic iSCSI SAN
Dell Compellent Mixed Fibre Channel and iSCSI SANs Best Practices and Configuration
Dell EqualLogic MPIO Tools for Microsoft Windows, VMware and Linux
Dell Force10 Networks SAN Best Practices and Configuration for Performance, Availability and Scalability
Ethernet for Dell EqualLogic: Integrating 10Gb and DCB into EqualLogic PS Series SANs
Dell Compellent iSCSI SAN Storage Best Practices and Configuration

For more information on these and other networking technologies, please visit the Dell Networking booth or follow @DellNetworking on Twitter. For real-time updates on activity at Dell Storage Forum, search hashtag #DellSF12 on Twitter and check out the Dell Storage Forum Facebook page.

Praveen Asthana elaborates on mixed data center environments on Direct2Dell

Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 18:05:00 GMT

Our VP of Enterprise Marketing and Strategy just posted some thoughts on Direct2Dell regarding his time at the Gartner Data Center conference last week. If your interested with IT technology trends and for insight on how Dell is approaching it, I'd recommend keeping up with Praveen's posts (you can subscribe to them here).

He outlines a Dell approach on the data center of the future that's different than a lot of other views out there. According to Praveen, data centers will have some physical infrastructure, a lot of virtualized infrastructure implemented as a private cloud with links to one or more public clouds.

Here's a Dell Tech Center interview with Praveen just after he finished his part in the Gartner Data Center Conference.

(Please visit the site to view this video)

You can also follow Praveen on Twitter @asthanaprav. Otherwise, click on the image below read his post on Direct2Dell:

Big Data and Little Data: from Zynga to Moneyball

Praveen Asthana — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 14:00:00 GMT

Farmville, the online game, is a pretty simple game, but behind it is a lot of sophisticated information technology. Every day Zynga, the company that produces Farmville, runs extensive statistical analysis of reams of data (Zynga has one of the largest data warehouses in the world and generates over 15 TB of new data every single day). Zynga’s goal is to drive player actions that improve financial conversion (i.e. player paying real money for elements of the game) and player retention. To accomplish this Zynga uses the results of continuous data analyses of player actions to test, iterate, and fine tune features in their games. As such, Zynga is a company on the forefront of the fast growing field of “Big Data Analytics,” which is the analysis of large-scale data for predictive intelligence. Indeed, Zynga has even referred to itself as an analytics company masquerading as a gaming company.

Another, more mainstream, example of a company heavily using analytics for competitive advantage is the Swedish car company, Volvo. Volvo collects terabytes of data from a multitude of embedded sensors in their cars in the field, from their CRM systems, from dealerships, and from their factory test beds. These various data streams are combined and analyzed to yield early predictive information, for example, on manufacturing defects that haven’t even shown up yet. All vertical industries can benefit from analytics, some more than others. For example, McKinsey & Co. estimates that retail chains can increase their margins by 60% based on the best practice use of big data analytics. A pioneer in this field has, of course, been Wal-Mart, which was doing Big Data analytics long before it became sexy.

So what is the ominous sounding Big Data really and how is it different from, say, “normal sized” data?

Big Data refers to huge amounts of data, hundreds of terabytes, even petabytes of information. It is usually unstructured data and consists of data sets that may be unrelated to each other, i.e. data from a variety of independent streams (such as twitter, social media, traditional CRM, surveys, demographic data, defect data etc). This is different from traditional data sets which are often relational. Another key aspect of Big Data analytics is analytic velocity, or put more simply, rapid, almost real time analysis of the data.

Big data analysis usually breaks traditional data base and analytics process and systems. First, the data sets may be too big, second they aren’t relational, third, they need extremely rapid analysis. To accommodate these needs a new industry has sprung up based on emerging technologies such as Hadoop MapReduce, the R statistical language, and new high performance infrastructure solutions such as parallel multi-processing, high speed networking, fast I/O storage (including emerging flash based storage). Furthermore, Big Data analytics is requiring a new class of skilled worker: the data scientist, or even the data artist. Some companies have now appointed Chief Analytics Officers.

Dell has been a solution provider in the field of “Big Data” analytics even before it became a buzzword. Our server infrastructure is used at some of the largest gaming companies in the world; Dell networking switches based on high performance Force 10 technology are standard in many large scale big data installations. In addition to infrastructure, Dell has partnered with leading software vendors such as Cloudera for Hadoop technology.

But you don’t have to be part of the petabyte club to get the benefits of analytics. Gaining value from information is not limited to big data sets. Indeed while there is a great deal of industry buzz for the phrase “Big Data” (big data = big bandwagon), the reality is that most organizations can glean a lot of insight from “normal sized” data sets (i.e., a few Terabytes) or even “little data.” Take for example the recent movie, “Moneyball” which is based on a true story. It tells the story of a man named Bill James, who analyzed statistical data from baseball games looking for patterns, and based on this analysis, came up with winning strategies for the Oakland A’s baseball team. The data sets that Bill James analyzed were incredibly small compared to the data sets found in true big data situations or even normal sized data warehouses, but nonetheless, they yielded critical insights that helped the Oakland A’s go on a winning run.

So it is not about big data, it is all about big insights. And you can get lots of big insights from even small amounts of data if you do intelligent analysis. For example, smaller organizations can analyze CRM and accounting data to glean sometimes counterintuitive insights, for example on who their most profitable customer segments or marketing actions really are, so they can focus their efforts appropriately.

To help meet the needs of organizations looking to gain insight from their “normal sized” data, Dell offers a range of infrastructure, services, and solutions. For example, Dell’s storage solutions, based on the Fluid Data Architecture, enable the right data to be available at the right time for efficient and rapid analysis. Dell provides a number of business intelligence consulting services and has partnerships with leading analytics vendors such as Oracle, Microsoft and SAP.

Dell’s overall goal is to help CIOs realize the full potential of their title: Chief Information Officer rather than just being the Chief Infrastructure Officer.

Data is on a growth binge, are you equipped? [Infographic]

Nicole Smith — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:08:00 GMT

Data is coming from more sources and is there is greater variety in the types of data being collected. Those game-changing factors present questions about how enterprises can analyze big data in order to act on it. Not to mention, once you have it, how do you store it all?

The volume of data that enterprises will be managing in the next five years is staggering. Gartner estimates that information volume is growing at 59 percent annually. But volume is just a slice of the challenge and it’s important to avoid a myopic approach to information management.

“Information managers must fundamentally rethink their approach to data by planning for all the dimensions of information management," said Mark Beyer, research vice president at Gartner in a news release related to a June big data report.

"IT leaders must educate their business counterparts on the challenges, while ensuring some degree of control and coordination so that the big-data opportunity doesn't become big-data chaos, which may raise compliance risks, increase costs and create yet more silos," Beyer added.

Dell storage solutions include hardware, software and services that can help manage big data.

Embed the graphic - cut and paste source code below:

<a href="http://content.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/storage-solutions.aspx">Storage solutions</a> infoGraphic from Dell <br/><img src="http://en.community.dell.com/resized-image.ashx/__size/550x0/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-00-00-11/2465.dell2_5F00_7.png" alt="Data Footprint"/>

Cloud Expo: Boomi case study — Enterprise Community Housing

Barton George—Director, Web & Tech Vertical Market — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 14:11:00 GMT

Earlier today at Cloud Computing Expo here in New York, Boomi CTO Rick Nucci conducted a session entitled “Cloud Integration: Best practices for IT Executives.” Rick did a great job sketching out the issues to consider and what to take into account with regards to integration. The most compelling part of the talk, however came from Pradip Sitaram, CIO of Enterprise Business Partners and Boomi customer. Enterprise is a not-for-profit that builds affordable housing across the U.S.

After Pradip got off stage I sat down with him and got him to give a condensed version of his talk:

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Some of the ground Pradip covers:

Enterprise homes house over 1 million people and every 55 minutes somebody moves into an enterprise home.
Dealing with the financial and occupancy reports that come from over 1600 properties, on a daily, monthly and yearly basis. How Boomi provided a solution to dealing with and managing these reports that was a fraction of the quote from the other vendor, and could be implemented in weeks instead of months.
Their longer term issue of dealing with over 70 databases that are out dated and need to be modernized. The answer is to go to the cloud and Boomi will act as their strategic integration platform making sure that all the pieces old and new work together.

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

Time to pack your bags for the Dell Storage Forum!

Gina Rosenthal — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 17:29:00 GMT

Can you believe that the Dell Storage Forum is less than a week away? There have already been some great posts about what to expect, like this one from the Dell Tech Center. You can find full schedule details on the Dell Storage Forum microsite. This post is to help you get ready for the social activities, whether you are coming to Orlando or if you weren’t able to make it this time.

Social Set-up

Our “home-base” for social will be the Dell Storage Forum Facebook fan page. We will be adding all the links we run across to the fan page, but don’t be shy! If you write a blog post, or post a picture, or see any other good #dellsf11 content, please just post it to the wall.
Facebook not your thing? We have a LinkedIn event page, sign up there and start connecting with others who are coming to Orlando.
The tag/hashtag for the event is #dellsf11 – please add it to your tweets, posts, images, etc. It will help us find all the stuff you are posting.
The Twitter account is @dellsf. We have a list of attendees, please let us know if we have missed you.
Here’s a tip for following the conference – follow that list! Usually the people who are most engaged on social media will be using Twitter. Twitter is the easiest way for us to share content, so if you follow the list you will get the best content as it happens.
One good way to follow the action (especially if you can’t be with us) is to use Twazzup. Once the conference gets going, it will have links to most of the content that is shared via social media

Fluid Blogger’s Lounge

The Fluid Blogger’s Lounge will be open Monday thru Thursday – officially right after the general sessions till 6 (except Monday). You don’t have to be a blogger to get in, you just need to be active in social media. The idea is to give you a place to recharge your machines, hook into ethernet for uploading videos/images, and to reconnect with others in the Dell Storage community.
We won’t have an official sign-up sheet, we are fluid, after all . We will have a sign-in board for everyone to tag the first time they visit. No fancy beverages, but we will have water and sodas. Please come by and connect with the community!

Silicon Angle’s Cube TV

Silicon Angle’s Cube TV will be broadcasting live interviews from the Forum Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. This is sort of like ESPN for tech conferences, we’ll be bringing in executives, partners, customers, and storage experts for interviews, in many cases immediately after they have given presentations. It makes for vibrant, interesting internet TV.
You can access the live feed at http://www.justin.tv/siliconangletv.

Tweetup – the Infosmack team will be in the house!

If you will be in Orlando, please sign up for the Dell Storage Forum tweetup. It will be at Ragland Road, an Irish Pub in Downtown Disney. You’ll need a ticket, sign up quick – there are only 33 tickets left!
The Infosmack Podcast team will be there, recording their podcast for the Dell Storage Forum. It should be a great time.

Tuesday Keynote will be livestreamed

Darren Thomas, VP and GM of Dell Enterprise Storage, and Phil Soran, President, Dell Compellent, will share what’s new and what’s next for the Dell Fluid Data architecture during the Tuesday morning keynote.
Here’s how to connect so you can hear the keynote live:

Dell Fluid Data Architecture
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
8:00 ̶ 9:30 a.m. EDT
Password: DellSF11

Wednesday – #SANchat live from the Fluid Blogger’s Lounge

We will be hosting #SANchat live from the Fluid Blogger’s Lounge. If you are in Orlando, stop by and join in. If you are not in Orlando, all you need to do if you want to participate is sign into Twitter, and watch for and respond to the #SANchat hashtag. We recommend using Tweetchat.
Here are the details for June’s #SANchat:

Wednesday, June 8, 2011
2:00 — 3:00 p.m. EDT
Topic: Data Center Bridging (DCB)

As you can see, the social calendar is packed! Please connect with us, let’s grow this Dell Storage Community!

For Sale: Dell OptiPlex 790 Business Desktop

Mike Basore, OptiPlex Desktops Team — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 06:10:00 GMT

Earlier this year, we announced our new business client portfolio which included our family of OptiPlex business desktops. Availability of the systems started a few weeks later with the OptiPlex 990, our most powerful, most manageable and environmental conscious commercial desktop we've ever offered. And today marks the availability of our mainstream business desktop, the OptiPlex 790.

The entire OptiPlex 790 family has been redesigned and is offered in four different chassis sizes; mini-tower, desktop, small form factor and ultra-small form factor. Additionally, the system is available with two All-in-One stand options that enable deployment as a single device with up to 24" displays. These stands were noted for their "flexibility with regard to onsite configuration" and for being "well-differentiated." Last year the 790's predecessor, the OptiPlex 780, earned PC Magazine's Editors' Choice award as "one of the best USFF desktop and monitor combinations out there."

The key enhancements to this mainstream business desktop family focus on design, business-class control and performance and productivity.

I'll start with our design enhancements. In addition to the four different chassis options, these systems represent Dell's most environmentally responsible commercial desktop offering. All systems have a minimum of 10% post-consumed recycled plastic enclosure and offer 90% efficient power supplies option. And starting with the OptiPlex small form factor, Dell provides select polyvinyl chloride free (PVC-free) configurations and recyclable packaging.

Another key attribute of the OptiPlex 790 is its "business-class control." The OptiPlex 790 offers the following:

Dell Data Protection security capabilities for one-touch preset compliance policy templates and flexible encryption (including removable devices)
Intel Standard Management technology to enable efficient remote system management for managing multiple systems simultaneously
Full compatibility with Dell KACE system management appliances for easy deployment of remote manageability and maintenance simplification
Dell Desktop Services ensure OptiPlex assets are backed with proven professional IT services and support worldwide, ranging from deployment to maintenance or web solutions to help IT to simplify their daily tasks.

The third attribute I wan to highlight is performance and productivity. The OptiPlex 790 offers nearly the same performance and features as its big brother, the 990. I'll touch on the use of the new Intel Core i processors in a moment but when you're talking about productivity, it's hard to beat four simultaneous video displays. And thanks to its dual PCI-express slots, the 790 is capable of just that and enables increased visual real estate and workflow productivity. For organizations utilizing virtualization, the OptiPlex 790 supports virtualization solutions ranging from virtual remote desktop control to on-demand desktop streaming or client hosted virtualization.

In closing and for nostalgic purposes, I thought it would be interesting to share this bit of trivia: When the Dell OptiPlex brand of business desktops launched in 1993, customers could configure the mid-range models (OptiPlex 433/L, 450/L and 466/L) with the Intel 80486 microprocessor. In case you were wondering, the OptiPlex brand was launched just before Intel began branding their microprocessor technology Pentium. The three different models offered processor speeds of 33MHz, 50MHz and 66MHz respectively. What's powering the OptiPlex 790 desktop now? The desktops can now be configured with 2nd generation Intel® Core i3, i5 and i7 processors. This includes processor speeds from 3.1GHz up to the quad-core 3.4GHz option. And when compared to last year's 780 model, we're seeing a performance increase of more than 30%. I don't have the performance data based on the first-ever OptiPlex desktop but it's fair to say we're come a long way.

One more thing: In 1993, OptiPlex 433 pricing started at $2,249 USD. Today, pricing for the OptiPlex 790 starts at $981 USD.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Expanding our Solution Centers

Lee Morgan — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 17:00:00 GMT

We announced last week that we are expanding our investment in Solution Centers this year. We are currently adding incremental infrastructure and enhancing our customer engagement capabilities for our existing centers in Austin, Frankfurt, Limerick and Tokyo, as well as building a number of new centers in some key global locations (see map outline below).

Our Centers

At our Solution Centers we support customers with technical briefings, architectural design sessions and proof of concepts and also work on solution integration & validation and ISV certification. We are focused on vertical and customer use-cases, to help our customers experience how our solutions can meet their specific requirements.

Our Solution Centers are built and run on Dell’s platforms, representing a “living lab” to showcase real-world application of our technologies and capabilities. We also have dedicated experts in our centers to work with our customers and share best practices and knowledge. This infrastructure and expertise allows our customer’s to prove out and optimize their architectures on Dell infrastructure, before moving into a production internal or cloud delivered environment.

Why use a Solution Center?

With our labs, people and infrastructure we are able to provide a complete experience to our customers, who can now come into our labs to talk to the experts, understand our technologies, and get hands-on experience with our solutions. And through a remote infrastructure, our customers can engage through the cloud, ensuring easy and flexible access, enabling virtual access and for our global customers to link multiple locations into the capabilities we offer.

The big benefit of a Solution Center visit is to build belief and reduce risk around deployment of new solutions within an organization. We offer customers the ability to run their own use-cases on Dell solutions in a Proof of Concept environment, so that they have the validation and proof points that they need, as well as the understanding of how Dell will carry the project through to implementation and support.

Amongst the many solutions we support, customers can experience the solutions we have just launched such as Dell Desktop Virtualization Solutions and Email and File Archive. We have the in-house expertise to demonstrate these solutions and to guide customers along the path to rolling out their own solutions.

We’ll keep you posted as we launch our centers, check back for further updates next month! And if you are a customer who could benefit from a Solution Center engagement, please contact your Dell account team for further information.