This should be no surprise to anyone: Dell is a customer-focused company. We
have a large direct sales team and over 35,000 channel partners that are out in
front of customers every day. We have briefing centers in which customers talk
to us about their IT challenges and how we can help them solve those issues. We
have an Executive Learning Series where we meet with customers every day. Dell
is a listening company.
One topic that consistently comes up in all those discussions is the topic of
virtualization. If
customers aren’t currently virtualizing their infrastructures, they are getting
ready to do so. They’re looking for ways to simplify operations and save money,
and there’s no doubt virtualization is an excellent way to do both.
Virtualization has
been and continues to be a clear trend in 2009. In fact, Dell itself has
virtualized more than 5,000 of its own servers and is aiming to do an additional
3,000-4,000 this year. You can learn more about Dell’s implementation in this case
study.
With this as the industry backdrop, it’s pretty cool that Dell was recently
named by customers as the “Best Overall Provider of Storage for Virtualized
Environments” by Nemertes Research (The report is attached below as an Adobe Acrobat file). Tim Sherbak from Dell’s storage team was recently in
San Francisco where he accepted a Pilot Lighthouse award from Nemertes.
Additionally, two of our customers, Lulu and Safeway Insurance, also won awards
for their innovative use of Dell EqualLogic storage products. You can read more
about Safeway’s virtualization setup in this
case study.
As Tim discusses in the video, we’re really proud to win this award because
it’s based on the experiences of Dell EqualLogic customers like Lulu and
Safeway. He also discusses the unique capabilities of the EqualLogic
architecture that makes it easy to deploy, manage and scale in a virtual
setting.
Congratulations to Lulu, Safeway and the Dell EqualLogic engineering team.