This week we’re in Las Vegas for Dell World to celebrate our customers and the coming together of all the Dell Technologies family of brands in one place, at one conference. Customers are at the heart of everything we do and Dell World is laser focused on their needs and how we can enable them to make real IT transformation. So I am delighted to see robust customer participation from all segments of our build to buy continuum portfolio at the event.
The College of the Ozarks
Hyper-converged infrastructure is one of the fastest growing segments of the IT market and Dell’s HCI portfolio has outgrown the total HCI market, according to IDC. This is a phenomenal success built on delivering tangible benefits for customers such as The College of the Ozarks.
The College of the Ozarks had a virtual infrastructure that was at the end of its current hardware lifecycle and in need of a refresh. Issues around storage, compute and hypervisor caused delays and finger pointing when working through support issues. A partial implementation of another hyper-converged solution did not meet expectations. Dell’s Converged Platforms and Solutions came to the rescue by replacing the existing infrastructure with three VxRail Appliances. As a result, the customer has seen decreased incidents of downtime from two/three a week to zero. Also, a drastic decrease of backend storage latency has increased productivity in campus suite software as well as website responsiveness, email, and other software. The time saved has been used to work on other automation projects, which directly feed back into the VxRail environment. This Dell solution has saved the college nearly $400,000, a saving that will lift the spirit of any IT director. Read More
Cianbro
If HCI is one of the fastest growing IT segments, one in which Dell is growing faster than the competition, we are the undisputed leader of converged infrastructure – the market category we created. And when a customer combines our converged and hyper-converged offerings the transformation in performance can be turbo-charged, as realized by Cianbro.
Founded in 1949 by the Cianchette Brothers, Cianbro is now one of the United States’ largest, most diverse, open shop, 100% employee-owned (30th largest in the United States) construction and construction services companies. It is also one of the most successful. Facing rapid growth, Cianbro needed to replace an aging infrastructure that was only 70 percent virtualized, had limited rack space, multi-vendor support and no true disaster recovery (DR) solution. A solution combining the VxBlock System and VxRail Appliance offered risk mitigation, and a solid DR option. Now IT is better positioned to support the business by spending far less time on maintaining infrastructure and more time on innovation. The customer expects a five year potential benefit of over $2.6M. Another slam dunk win!
Express Scripts
Moving up the digital stack was Express Scripts, one of the largest pharmacy benefit management companies in the U.S. In order to support the constantly evolving needs of its many internal stakeholders (370 registered specialist pharmacists, 560 field based nurses etc.) Express Scripts’ IT department wanted to move fast towards the cloud and opted for a Dell Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC), topped up with a Pivotal Cloud Foundry Stack. Moving fast, Dell was able to deliver an Enterprise Hybrid Cloud for IaaS in 14 days and implemented a complaint hybrid cloud in 90 days. An ability to provision applications in minutes as opposed to the previous six months, a performance increase of 15 percent and an overall increase in service level and revenues via an increased number of mail order prescriptions are just some of the benefits realized by Express Scripts. It is this kind of forward thinking which has resulted in Express Scripts being recognized as a winner at the IT Transformation REALIZED awards.
Want to find out how Express Scripts transformed their IT infrastructure? Watch this video.
University of Pisa
Whether it’s quantum chemistry, genome sequencing or engineering simulations, high performance computing (HPC) is being used in an increasing variety of disciplines. The University of Pisa was keen to build a world class computing facility for modern R&D as HPC was fast becoming a foundational resource for more than 200 University users. In order to fully enable these users to continue to push the boundaries of knowledge, the University partnered with Dell and Intel to build an IT infrastructure that delivers the compute power, storage capacity, and performance required to do advanced and innovative research in highly competitive fields.
The focal point of the effort is the Dell | Intel Competence Centre for Cloud and High Performance Computing. Dell has helped to create a state-of-the-art storage and computing environment for the University’s students and researchers who, in turn, are helping with a number of proofs of concepts. You can read more here.
These are just a few examples. There are scores more customers at Dell World showcasing how they have taken advantage of converged solutions to modernize and transform their IT infrastructure and deliver business value.