Dell Reiterates Services Strength, Unveils Latest Servers
At the Dell Enterprise Spring 2012 event yesterday, CEO Michael Dell himself took the stage to announce that thanks to his company’s 12 acquisitions over the last year, the tech titan is now a a complete IT solutions provider. To that end, Dell announced a line of new enterprise data center infrastructure solutions — headlined by the unveiling of the 12th generation (G12) Dell PowerEdge servers. Here’s the scoop.
Something Dell himself felt the need to reiterate several times over the course of the event was the concept that Dell’s not about boxes anymore — it’s all about services and value. Of course, it’s something we’ve heard before.
“We’ve transformed our business in the last few years,” Dell said. “It’s not a PC company. It’s an end-to-end IT solutions company.”
To that end, Dell’s presentation focused less on the specs of the PowerEdge G12 racks, blade and tower server and storage platform and more on the customer value the company’s adding with this new launch (the nitty-gritty details are promised as we get closer to general availability, which, according to Dell, is “soon”).
And much of that value hinges on the addition of recently acquired Force10‘s networking technology into the PowerEdge platform, meaning that all Dell servers, storage and networking can leverage 10GbE speeds. That translates into a potential tenfold boost in application performance, Dell said.
As for the new PowerEdge servers, Dell is heavily promoting a few features: the extension of the Fluid Data Architecture to the server, which can boost Microsoft SQL Server performance by 10.5 times; the second generation of its embedded systems management tools, which Dell claims can cut down on bare-metal deployment and provisioning time and effort by as much as 86 percent; and new power-saving measures that can cut down on data center CapEx by as much as $3 million per year.
According to Dell, it polled 7,700 customers in 17 countries in four continents to come up with that list of major improvements. Again, CEO Dell and the rest of his customer team said the goal here is delivering customer value.
Dell also took the lid off new EqualLogic storage arrays, including the midmarket-focused PS6110 series (72TB in a single array and 1.2PB in a single group) and the entry-level PS4110 (36TB in a single array and 72TB in a single group), both of which leverage the new 10GbE networking that the company is so keen on. Both are available today.
Other new announcements made at the event include:
- vStart for Dell Private Cloud — A quick-start private cloud solution built on PowerEdge G12 servers that’s supposed to eliminate a lot of the guesswork in getting set up.
- Dell Desktop Virtualization — A virtualized desktop appliance that comes in starter and enterprise editions, designed to ease the headaches of setting up smaller-scale VDI deployments.
- Quickstart Data Warehouse Appliance — An appliance for data warehousing and analysis built on PowerEdge G12 and including Dell Boomi for integration.
As you can see, Dell was pretty busy yesterday. I have a hunch your regularly scheduled VAR Guy will have some deeper insights on Dell’s hardware side as PowerEdge G12 nears general availability, while I’m going to post some follow-up cloud thoughts at my usual digs on TalkinCloud.
But on a final note, something else Dell said is definitely worth noting: Dell kept the channel in mind when developing these new PowerEdge servers, and channel expansion is on the roadmap. In fact, the channel may be Dell’s strongest front against competitor HP. So stay tuned to The VAR Guy for more.
