I spent the last couple of days here in Beijing getting ready for the Dell Solutions Summit (DSS) getting my kiosk and presentation ready for the launch of the S6000 platform built for virtualized data centers. The event is being held at the China National Convention Center – right across from the site of the 2008 international Olympics, overlooking China’s world famous Bird’s nest. The last couple of days we’ve been working on getting the solutions showcases ready in order to share a range of new technologies with customers from all over China and other parts of Asia. The solutions showcase is divided into four neighborhoods that support the transformational pillars for us here at Dell – connect, protect, inform, and transform.
The Solutions Showcase opened tonight at 8PM (Tuesday night, 8/27, here in China) with speeches from Amit Midha, the Asia-Pacific-Japan Region President, and Michael Dell. Following the keynote, attendees were invited to circulate around the hall and get a hands on experience with our technology. 
Both the S5000 and the S6000 are in the Inform neighborhood area of the solutions showcase. The S5000 was announced earlier in the year and is going to begin shipping later this month. It’s the world’s first completely modular switch that provides both LAN/SAN convergence in one switch. It also has the highest port density vs. Cisco or Brocade offerings and a full 40Gb uplink to the core. All of this convergence means tremendous operational and capital expense savings for customers; fewer adapters, optics, cables, switches, power, and cooling.
Making its debut simultaneously at Dell Solutions Summit and VMworld San Francisco, the S6000 is fast (2.56 Tbps) and has a very high port density. This switch is also future ready for virtualization and cloud deployments via VMware’s NSX gateway. If customers want a fast top of rack switch today as well as a future ready SDN switch, the S6000 is an excellent choice. As if those features weren’t cool enough, the S6000 is Fresh Air ready. At DSS, one reporter commented on the importance of an energy efficient data center saying, “Cooling is an extremely important issue for IT managers and businesses in general in the Asia region. Energy is expensive and conditions can be extremely harsh. It equipment that can help businesses with cooling are badly needed.” He was happy to see that we are producing switches that are able to address power and cooling from a cost savings standpoint, the S5000, and now as well as from an energy efficiency standpoint, the S6000.
In addition to the announcement of the new switch, there was a SDN demo given by China’s local networking marketing manager, Jerry Yao. Dell China has had notable SDN networking successes with CSM Media Research and Shanghai Jiaotong University enabling both institutions to migrate to a cloud data center environment.
The events team has done a great job setting up the solutions showcase and the first night was a great success. I look forward to talking with more customers tomorrow and Thursday in the showcase, hear about their networking issues, and share how the S5000 and the S6000 can help them solve their current and future IT challenges! For the latest in Dell Networking, be sure to follow us on twitter and check out dellnetworking.com.
