Search results for 'app:weblogs' matching tag 'Storage Hardware'

Dell Outlines HPC Strategy and Cray Partnership

DELL-Donnie B — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Pushing the envelope and finding new innovative ways to deliver an HPC (High-Performance Computing) solution is a priority at Dell. Our recent partnership announcement with Cray and Microsoft illustrate how industry leaders are going about making HPC make more accessible, scalable and affordable.

The Cray CX1-iWS, available exclusively through Dell, combines Cray’s HPC experience with Dell’s market reach resulting in a desk side “supercomputer” that is easy to configure, deploy, administer and use. Leveraging industry standard components such as Intel Xeon processors, Windows 2008 HPC software stack, the Cray CX1-iWS provides a good starting point for engineers, scientists and researchers including R&D groups who need a scalable HPC cluster. The key points on how the Cray CX1-iWS extends and complements traditional workstations by providing an affordably-priced departmental or workgroup HPC hub are covered in my video.

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Virtualization Déjà Vu

Dell-Jennifer G — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:00:00 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?

The Other Side of the FCoE Story

Dell-Jennifer G — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 05:00:00 GMT

My husband says I’m passionate, and that’s why I like to argue. I’ve been wishing for an argument on FCoE for some time now (a wish in which I’m not alone), but all I run across is how FCoE is going to save the world.

In my search for the rest of the story (as the late Paul Harvey would have said), I talked with some of our technical folks to get the scoop. FCoE performance compares are one thing, but it’s important to balance the promises-of-FCoE argument with some concerns. Check out some of the FCoE discussion points pulled together by two of our engineers, and let us know what you think.

It’s a Wrap: Dell Power Solutions Magazine September 2009 Issue

DELL-Tom K — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Wrapping up each quarterly issue of Dell Power Solutions Magazine is akin to a symphony of the publication persuasion, the movements carefully orchestrated to simultaneously deliver over 130 pages of content in print, digital, and Web form factors.

But all of the editorial in the September 2009 issue is so much beautiful music now and queued for immediate playback: get it by clicking through to the Web Edition or Digital Edition.

The key content track in this issue is around Storage Efficiency, headlined by an exclusive interview with the visionaries behind Dell’s game-changing enterprise storage portfolio that spans Fibre Channel, iSCSI, network attached storage (NAS) and direct-attach technologies.

Find out what Darren Thomas and Paula Long have to say about the state of enterprise storage and why storage virtualization plays such a pivotal role in data center optimization.

Deeper technical tracks in the storage section include “Allocating Storage with Virtual Provisioning on Dell/EMC CX4 Series Storage Arrays,” “Mixing Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet in a Dedicated SAN Infrastructure,” and “Dell EqualLogic PS4000 Arrays: Cost-Effective iSCSI SANs for SMBs and Remote Offices.”

Also, check out our Efficient Enterprise section in this issue for the latest in virtualization guidance around VMware vSphere 4 and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. And for a decidedly lighter reading track, check out our Online Exclusives page for new Enterprise Insights: quick-read, one- or two-page perspectives covering a much broader range of IT topics.

Among the latest postings are a pair of articles around social media, including “Top 5 Ways to Get Started with Social Media in the Enterprise” and “Wisdom of the Masses.”

I encourage you to take a look at these articles and let me know your thoughts on them.

Watering My SMB Roots

Dell-Jennifer G — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 05:00:00 GMT

It’s hard to believe that I’ve now been at Dell for almost 10 years. Where did the time go? I think back to my first year at Dell as a fledging server marketing manager, studying RAID groups, redundant-hot-swap whatever every night when I went home, so I wouldn’t get roasted by the hard-core technical sales reps (TSRs). Let’s be clear … they roasted me anyway, but at least it was on my terms. Anyone that knows me knows I thrive on sarcasm and strong personalities. Those guys shaped me into the storage person I am today.

I was part of the Small and Medium Business (SMB) group of Dell back in those days. I loved the emotion involved in that job … entrepreneurs growing their businesses, people in love with their job (not necessarily in love with IT) -- I could relate. After living in that universe for almost three years, it became my foundation. Our performance plans call it Customer Advocacy (or something like that), but it ingrained a passion in me that still surfaces regularly today.

Maybe that’s why I’m all over our new PowerVault NX300 Network-Attached Storage (NAS) platform. It gives me a chance to get back on my SMB soap box and show how we’re addressing their business problems with technology -- like the quick set up, convenient yet advanced file sharing and the ability to reduce duplicate files, do snapshots and replicate files. Dell’s seamless integration of our hardware and Windows Storage Server 2008 make all of this possible.

We announced the NX300 introduction today as part of a larger launch addressing SMBs. It feels good to give back a little efficiency to the folks that essentially started my career.

Imprisonment or Independence in the Data Center … Your Choice

Dell-Jennifer G — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 05:00:00 GMT

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.

Dell Boosts Options for Virtualization – Adds 10GbE and Automatic VM Discovery on CX4

DELL-Greg W — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 05:00:00 GMT

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.

Dell EqualLogic PS4000E "One Classy IP SAN Appliance"

DELL-Bruce Eric — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 05:00:00 GMT

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."

The Future of Data Deduplication

DELL-Greg W — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 05:00:00 GMT

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.

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Storage Networking World - My Thoughts

DELL-Larry H — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 05:00:00 GMT

After spending last week at SNW to present on 6Gbps SAS and virtualization, I left with a lot on mind. First, it was a great show and SNIA and Computerworld are to thank for that. Their professionalism in running an event are second to none.

Everyone has asked me two things. First, I get asked, “How was attendance?” Frankly, it was light. However, it seemed that there was a significant presence of smaller organizations from the region attending. It was refreshing to discuss their strategies as we often get consumed by thoughts of mega data centers and can easily forget about issues that impact smaller organizations.

For instance, one small IT shop was trying to develop a disaster recovery program for their one and only server farm. While we might envision a world in which that DR site would be hundred, if not thousands, of miles away, they simply wanted to replicate their server environment four miles away. Why? Because someone might steal their servers and walk away with the company’s entire database! Talk about needing some insight on the best buy to replicate data! SNW provided that type of information and made this end-user's time at the event purposeful.

The second question I get is “What was everyone talking about?” It seemed that the usual hot topics received the most attention: SSDs, virtualization, dedup, tiering and green. A few thoughts on each…

SSDs – the Lamborghini of storage. My colleague at Microsoft, Chris Lionetti, offered up this nugget…”if you’re not already short stroking your drives, why would you use SSDs to improve your performance?” Good point on performance. However, I would offer that many are concerned with power savings, but at the current price points that may require a long payback period.

Virtualization – the catch-all phrase for everything cool in high-tech. Many end users are confused by the term "virtualization." Why? Because every supplier in the world is using the term in different ways. For environments in which you've deployed typical virtual OS (VMware, Hyper-V or Zen), I recommend that you choose storage solutions that allow you to aggregate your storage into a common pool, is built upon a Unified Fabric of Ethernet and is highly optimized. Might I suggest EqualLogic? Sorry, couldn't help myself.

Dedup – a classic duh. Who wouldn’t want to dedup data whenever possible? Backup data is a great place to start.

Tiering – a great architecture allowing you to deliver high-performance SAS drives for applications and lower-cost, lower-performance SATA drives for less frequently accessed data.

Green – we’re all getting greener…more efficient power supplies, lower power SSD drives, deduping data, tiering to put less used data on lower power drives, virtualized environments that more fully utilize the hardware we deploy, energy efficient Ethernet. This is not only great for the environment, but it also reduces your power expenses, which aligns your goals more completely with your organization’s needs even if you don’t directly own the budget for that expense.

With President Obama’s cap-and-trade proposals it may have material impact to your organization’s bottom line in the years to come.

Next up…Interop. Hope to see you there!