New Dell Servers Reflect Focus on Enterprise

Dell-m620-server

The Dell Poweredge M620 blade server, part of the new 12th generation server series unveiled by Dell yesterday. (Photo: Dell Inc.)

During a worldwide three city event Monday Michael Dell emphasized the company's growing focus on enterprise server, storage and networking services. "You’re going to hear today about a very different kind of Dell than you would have heard about five years ago,” said Michael Dell. “Within the context of a $3 trillion global market in information technology, consumer is $250 billion. The commercial business is $2.75 trillion. We tend to focus more on that.”

High performance end-to-end infrastructures

Dell announced a full portfolio of 12th Generation blade, rack and tower PowerEdge servers optimized to run mission-critical business applications. The company highlighted advances in systems management that make it easier for administrators to deploy and monitor servers. Dell said its embedded server management tools (IDCRAC7 with Lifecycle Controller 2.0) allow customers to automate more functions and make it easier to implement energy-saving strategies like power capping.

"Customers tell us they want a high-performance infrastructure that is easy to manage and helps them quickly deliver business outcomes," said Brad Anderson, President of Enterprise Solutions Group at Dell. "Today we are introducing a new set of data center infrastructure solutions that share key capabilities across our entire portfolio, from servers to storage to networking. When combined with the second generation of embedded systems management in our servers, Dell is delivering one of the most robust and easy-to-manage data center infrastructures in the industry.”

Storage, vStart and a Data Warehouse Appliance

Dell also announced EqualLogic PS6110 Series and PS6110 Series storage arrays. The PS6110 is aimed at the mid-sized market with multiple physical or virtual servers. The arrays can be scaled up to 1.2 petabytes in a single group.  The PS4110 Series are the first 10GbE EqualLogic entry-point  arrays and are designed for smaller deployments and remote office locations. The systems scale up to 72 terabytes in a single group.

While being open and flexible on networking equipment by offering Brocade, Juniper and Cisco on top of its own Force 10 networking gear, Dell will soon be a company that sells only its own storage gear.  Michael Dell pointed out that 93 percent of storage sales were derived from Dell storage gear - quickly on its way to 100 percent.

The new Dell vStart for Dell private Cloud is designed to help businesses rapidly deploy their own private cloud. vStart enables IT service delivery through a pre-built infrastructure which includes the new 12th generation PowerEdge server, storage, networking and management components.

Dell unveiled the Dell Quickstart Data Warehouse Appliance that will help mid-market and departmental users easily organize, access and analyze data, enabling them to take advantage of business intelligence to make more informed decisions. The data warehousing appliance, which is based on the new Dell PowerEdge servers and Microsoft SQL Server 2012, will leverage Dell Boomi for data integration.

“Dell continues to invest significantly in its enterprise capabilities and has made impressive progress to become a trusted enterprise IT solutions vendor," said Matt Eastwood, Group Vice President, Enterprise Platform Research at IDC. "Today we’re seeing the next big push from Dell as it focuses on solving its customers' biggest pain points by delivering design innovation and operational efficiency for data centers of all sizes. Dell has optimized its entire portfolio of PowerEdge servers to address the most demanding workloads and to seamlessly scale from small businesses to its largest enterprise customers."

Rich Miller contributed to this article.