Today we took the wraps off of Dell’s broadest enterprise portfolio of integrated products ever – all designed with an obsession to improve enterprise computing efficiency. In launch events in Sydney, London, Dubai and San Francisco we announced 14, count ‘em, 14 new enterprise products and six associated services to help companies and organizations grow their IT infrastructure faster, smarter and more efficiently.
Here is a run-down of the new portfolio:
- Five new blades and servers and three workstations that are as gorgeous to look at as they are efficient at running massive data warehouses and thousands of exchange mail boxes at the same time;
- Five new enterprise-class storage arrays, including the EqualLogic PS6000, that write and read data blazingly fast;
- Six new Dell ProSupport, ProManage and ProConsult services that remove complexity;
- One, just one, innovative new systems management console that does the work of nine ordinary systems management consoles;
This announcement comes at a time when the industry is absolutely abuzz over a shifting competitive battlefield – with Cisco bravely entering the server market with a virtualization appliance – and rampant rumors of industry consolidation. Why so much interest in enterprise technology? Because there is a thirst for new technology that helps companies run their businesses more efficiently.
The industry is also anxiously awaiting the launch new Intel Nehalem architecture, which is expected to provide big improvements in performance, energy efficiency and virtualization performance.Dell, of course, will have those much-anticipated new Intel Nehalem processors in our servers, blades and workstations.
But that’s just one small part of what is new in our 11th generation PowerEdge servers, introduced today. The new PowerEdge line-up has customer inspired innovations in simplified management, cutting-edge design, energy efficiency and virtualization performance. In lieu of spouting off benchmarks (which we can’t talk about yet anyway), here is a little bit about the innovations that make it possible to get screaming performance. If you want more technical details, join us at 1pm CDT on March 31 for a live chat session with Dell and Intel Performance Engineers. We will discuss performance benefits of the Intel Nehalem architecture on the new Dell PowerEdge 11G servers. Click here to join in that session.
To rev up virtualization, Dell has embedded hypervisors, with up to 125 percent increased memory footprint and more integrated I/O. Plus, you have your choice of hypervisors from VMware, Citrix or Microsoft.
Our new PowerEdge servers and blades have energy-tuned technologies to slash power consumption while cranking performance capacity. We do that by loading the servers with efficient power supply units, improved system-level design efficiency, policy-driven power and thermal management and highly efficient standards-based Energy Smart components.
Finally, these are arguably the ‘sexiest’ servers in the industry – the Dell PowerEdge servers have already won awards for design including improved chassis, rails, cable management arms, hard drive carrier and latching. Not only do they look good and feel as solid, but they are a lot easier to set up and manage because of the inspired design.
Dell Precision Workstations
We also have three Nehalem-based Dell Precision Workstations – the T7500, T5500 and T3500. We partner with more than 35 leading software companies to make sure the programs and applications that matter most work incredibly well on our workstations (we certify 90 applications). We know you need stunning graphics, so we have new graphics options from both ATI and NVIDIA to make images and video come to life.
Systems Management
We’ve spent a lot of time working on embedded and simplified management functionality to help our customers take cost and complexity out of the data center. Dell is introducing the industry’s first embedded management functionality — no more CDs. Our embedded management radically simplifies common IT tasks like deployment, diagnostics, update and configuration. We’re also offering ImageDirect, a Web browser–based service that lets organizations securely create, deploy and manage software builds on Dell systems.
Another new feature, Dell Management Console, our newest addition to our OpenManage portfolio, gives a simplified and consolidated view into the entire data center infrastructure – whether it’s Dell hardware or a different brand. It is available for immediate download and will ship with every new Dell server.
Not only does this console manage any hardware in the data center, it also completely integrates with industry leading tools including those from Symantec. This means you can manage more functionality with fewer management tools.
To see more images of all the products we unveiled today, click on
this link to see them on Dell’s Official Flickr page.
I had a chance to catch up with Brad Anderson, SVP, Enterprise Product Group at Dell, to talk about the significance of this major announcement.
Here is what he had to say: