This post written by James H. Meeker, Global Product Marketing Manager, Converged Infrastructure Solutions
For more than a year, Dell has been shipping virtualization solutions for small and medium-sized businesses, vStart 50/100/200. Today, Dell is launching its newest solution platform for clouds — the vStart 1000. This is a significant evolution from previous solutions with new performance and scaling capabilities that include the integration of Compellent fibre channel storage, high performance 10GbE networking and the latest in 12th generation blade servers. There are a number of options within this family of solutions that address the high-capacity virtualization and private cloud requirements for both Microsoft and VMware hypervisor environments.
The decision to deliver these new solutions was driven by the need to support customers’ transition of data center applications to larger and more flexible hypervisor-based infrastructures. When virtualization densities and storage requirements increase, a scalable infrastructure quickly becomes critical to the data center’s ability to serve internal customers. The cornerstone of the vStart design consists of the enablement of independent resource growth, including storage, compute and network bandwidth for dynamic flexibility.
Cloud management tools, offered by Dell, VMware and Microsoft, are critical in a complex virtualized deployment. In addition, Dell helps deliver on the promise of the “single management console” with smart element plug-ins for these hypervisor vendors’ management applications. These collections of plug-ins help achieve a lower total cost of ownership associated with virtual environments by improving management capabilities.
For many organizations considering the transition to a cloud infrastructure, the engineering work to qualify very complex hardware/software stack can become a challenge, and in some cases, it introduces risk to the investment required to achieve an optimum solution. Dell’s Solution Engineering team has designed and built virtualization
and cloud solutions across the globe, we understand common requirements, critical elements and the desire to keep the architecture open. Complexity and proprietary are two words that are frequently associated with never ending costs. Dell’s solution approach is — open, ensuring you will be comfortable knowing future expansion can be possible within a budget.
This new vStart 1000 solution uses Dell’s design experiences, customer feedback and industry standard building blocks. 95% of the solution is built in our factory. Unless otherwise requested, we ship the solution, mostly pre-built, with a Dell technician who will be in charge of deploying and integrating the vStart in your environment. Your network settings will be used to set up the servers, storage, switches and software. Management and plug-ins will be installed on-site for tight integration. Once set-up, the technician will provide a knowledge transfer to your team to get them up and running quickly. Dell also provides support at a solution level for the whole vStart, not just technical help on individual components. This holistic approach to virtualization and cloud solutions make vStarts quick and safe path for your journey to the cloud.
To find out more about the Dell vStart family, visit www.dell.com/vstart