Editor’s Note: Dell World 2011 is over, but the conversation on innovation continues. Our next guest blog is from Ed Anderson, marketing director for Microsoft’s Server & Cloud Platform team, part of Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business (STB). Ed has responsibility for the marketing strategy related to Microsoft’s server, management, virtualization and cloud.
Dell and Microsoft have been great partners for many years and we were excited to be a Platinum partner at Dell’s inaugural customer event – Dell World. This was more than just an event sponsorship for Microsoft; it was an opportunity to reinforce the commitment we’ve made together to help our customers simplify virtualization management, reduce costs, and remove barriers to cloud adoption.
In April 2011, Dell and Microsoft announced a three-year initiative to help our customers deploy and manage virtualization and accelerate their move to private cloud. Since this announcement, we have been hard at work to deliver solutions that do just that.
At Dell World, Microsoft showcased the many ways Microsoft and Dell are working together to help our customers virtualize their IT environments and move forward in their journey to the private cloud. At the Microsoft booth we demonstrated how Microsoft System Center and Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager (AIM) provide integrated management tools that unify operations from physical machine to application workload. By leveraging this integrated solution, our customers can maximize their ROI, increase IT automation, and simplify IT operations management.
And just a few weeks ago, we announced the first solution from our joint initiative – Dell’s vStart 50m, a pre-built virtualization appliance that brings together Dell hardware and software and Windows Server Hyper-V to help organizations quickly and easily achieve benefits of virtualization without needing specialized skills. Dell’s vStart 50m is the newest offering in Dell’s vStart line and the first to support Hyper-V. Using vStart 50m, customers can focus their resources on creating business value rather than building infrastructure, accelerating their path to private cloud and with a lowered TCO. You can learn more about this new solution from Dell and get started today.
No matter where you are in your virtualization or cloud journey, Microsoft and our great partners like Dell, have solutions that will help you get cloud benefits today – on your terms. This is just the beginning of the new solutions coming from the Dell and Microsoft initiative.