by James Meeker, Converged Infrastructure Product Marketing Director
vStart solves needs for medium business and, now, large enterprise
I just returned from VMworld 2012, where we had huge crowds to see all of the innovative cloud and virtualization solutions Dell presented at the show. The highlight of our solution presentation was the new Dell vStart 1000v.
Drew Engstrom from Dell’s strategy team took part in the key note last Tuesday, doing a demo on the wide breadth of Dell’s end-to-end solution approach for the enterprise. (He also raised a significant donation for the Girl Scouts of America while at it). Check out the video below to see the demo.
The vStart 1000v is significant because it is Dell’s first vStart solution focused on the needs of large Enterprises, capable of supporting clouds with a number of advanced management options, including Dell’s VIS Creator.
The vStart 1000 takes an enterprise class architectural approach that provides a flexible foundation for IT departments to scale-out with a simple pay-as-you-grow model. The solution has up to two Dell M1000e blade chassis per pod, up to 32 M620 blade servers, which provide an easy way of growing VMs capable to meet your future virtualization demands. The vStart 1000v also provides scale out and performance capability with Dell’s Compellent Fibre Channel storage. Adding storage capacity or to increase performance is as simple as adding additional array shelves. Both Force 10 10GbE and Brocade FC switches are used to build the infrastructure fabrics and provide ample room for future expansion for additional vStart pods.
The management software tools available on the vStart 1000 include a number of bundled plug-ins to manage the physical infrastructure from within vCenter. The server plug-in will inventory server configurations and can quickly deploy bare metal servers when the vStart is expanded. (No PXE necessary). They are then presented into vCenter to load your OS for final deployment. This can take as little as 13 minutes, saving up to hours per server for the administrator. Dell also integrates warranty access into the plug-in, which can pull warranty information from Dell into vCenter, providing a comprehensive view of the infrastructure, improving the management capabilities.
James Meeker and Kailas Jawadekar show off the vStart 100 Best of SMB Product of VMworld award.
The vStart 1000 was not the only vStart to receive attention. The vStart 100 won recognition from Virtualization Review’s, Best SMB Product of VMworld. This is wonderful recognition for the platform, which is designed to meet the needs of medium-sized IT departments. You can learn more about this and other vStart solutions at www.dell.com/vStart.