Converged infrastructure choices from Dell

At its Dell Enterprise Forum customer and partner event, Dell has announced further differentiation to its converged infrastructure portfolio to help customers of all sizes address a common set of challenges related to the complexity, inefficiency and rigidity in current IT infrastructure. The new solutions can be tailored for specific application and workload use cases, and today, Dell is bringing enterprise-class converged technology to a whole new set of customers: branch office companies and the small and medium business market.

Dell is on the forefront of helping a broad range of customers with an array of converged and pre-integrated solutions, each designed to address these different customers’ common needs for simplicity and agility. In fact, a recent IDC forecast2 reveals that spending on converged systems will grow at a compound annual rate of more than 54 percent over the 2011-2016 forecast period, driven by the cost advantages and efficiency related to operations and management of IT, simplification of vendor engagement, and faster time to productivity with IT system updates.

“Dell’s customer-inspired innovation is driven by our deep understanding of the business realities impacting customers’ today, and interpreting those trends through delivery of modern IT architectures conceived and engineered for the needs of different businesses – one size does not fit all,” said Marius Haas, president of enterprise solutions for Dell. “With the new solutions we have unveiled today, Dell is demonstrating its differentiated approach to solution development for customers of all sizes – from the small office of five people to the world’s largest hyperscale datacentres.”

Office-scale: Dell PowerEdge VRTX
To date, workload and application-centric IT infrastructure has been engineered for large enterprises, and does not address the needs of quickly growing remote/branch office (ROBO) or small-to-medium business (SMB) customers. According to research commissioned in 2013 by Dell and Intel, U.S. small businesses and startups are more optimistic and planning to grow their companies in the near future and consider access to technology as key to successful growth. Despite this anticipated growth, most businesses surveyed say technology supports day-to-day operations, while only a moderate percentage view technology as a strategic asset. However, the technology solutions often used by these customers – particularly within healthcare, retail and banking industries – and channel partners lack the flexibility, scalability, and ease of management necessary to grow efficiently and compete with larger organisations.

Dell’s heritage is built on delivering IT solutions that scale to customers of all sizes. Following that customer focus, Dell introduces PowerEdge VRTX, the first converged IT solution designed specifically for remote and small office environments, with enterprise-class capabilities in a desk-side, space-saving design. Dell PowerEdge VRTX enables customers and partners to:
• Experience greater simplicity: With servers, storage, networking and management converged into a single compact chassis, PowerEdge VRTX uses up to 86 percent fewer cables and can save customers time, compared to installing individual task-specific systems. In addition it can eliminate the complexity, cost and sprawl of disparate external devices and multiple management tools.
• Realise improved efficiency: Experience enhanced productivity with updates to Dell OpenManage Essentials for PowerEdge VRTX which include comprehensive, remote, agent-free systems management capabilities with a new geographical view of distributed IT assets that can help save time and reduce potential for error. Bundled with each PowerEdge VRTX system is Dell’s Chassis Management Controller (CMC) embedded console, for unified and streamlined control over server, storage and networking components.
• Achieve greater value with a pre-configured solution: Dell PowerEdge VRTX addresses a need among channel partners for pre-configured, advanced business solutions that can be enhanced with software and services important to customers in vertical industries.

“The virtualization of the storage within the Dell PowerEdge RAID Controller (PERC) worked really well. It was amazingly simple to setup using the Dell Chassis Management Controller (CMC) and will provide a great platform for people to get started with virtualization from one box. The VRTX unit was very compact and well put together. Using it within a small organisation as their entire server platform or as a branch device for larger organisations will provide a straightforward and easy to manage environment,” said Rupert Mills, technical director at Krome Technologies. “We can see the VRTX being of great use to our education clients as they will be able to provide a simple to use, simple to manage, virtualised environment, constructed on high availability, modern infrastructure. Given the current indications we see this being done at a very sensible cost which will be attractive to a lot of people. As a disaster recovery package, we see the VRTX being able to give our small and medium enterprise (SME) clients a cost effective disaster recovery plan in conjunction with Dell’s AppAssure software which will enable them to provide a “single box” disaster recovery plan for their environments. Given its size and its amazingly low noise output, it could be located virtually anywhere for these organisations, making it a very practical choice.”

Enterprise-scale: Dell Active Infrastructure
Building on Dell’s Active Infrastructure launch in October 2012, today Dell announced its next wave of converged infrastructure offerings – Active Infrastructure 1.1 – to help organisations accelerate the delivery of business applications and IT services, improve data center efficiency and strengthen IT service quality. The updated Active Infrastructure portfolio includes:
• New validated workloads: Dell is introducing a fast, accurate way for customers to deploy common workloads, including key enterprise applications, virtual desktop and private cloud workloads. By leveraging out-of-the-box and custom workload templates as well as validated reference architectures, administrators can reduce the time and steps to provision new workloads by approximately 99 percent.
• Broader Portfolio of Pre-Integrated Systems: Dell is expanding its converged infrastructure platforms and reference architectures to include the Dell Active System 50, Dell Active System 200 and Dell Active System 1000. Together with the previously launched Active System 800, these pre-integrated systems come in multiple sizes depending on customer needs and application requirements, and enable up to six times faster implementation of new virtual infrastructure.
• Enhancements to unified management platform: Dell is announcing Active System Manager 7.1, the management layer for Active System that integrates IP from recently acquired Gale Technologies to automate workload and infrastructure deployment through a single console. Enabling customers to go from eight tools to one, Active System Manager 7.1 features deepvirtual integration, including support for the Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere platforms, stateless computing for workload scaling and migrations, rapid infrastructure on-boarding for discovering assets, and a broad compatibility matrix that includes support for Dell and heterogeneous environments.