This post was written by James Meeker, Dell Enterprise Global Marketing Manager for Converged Infrastructure
For attendees at Microsoft TechEd, this gathering affords opportunities to get caught up on the latest technologies from Microsoft and premier partners like Dell. This year’s show kept the attendees busy with a jam-packed conference schedule. As with all of these events, the Dell booth seemed to crowd quickly with customers and partners wanting to see Dell’s newest technologies and recently announced products.
The clear theme of the show was the Microsoft-enabled cloud and pending software launches coming from Redmond later this year, like Windows Server 2012. Cloud Computing is quickly transforming the industry, driving IT departments across the globe to examine previous assumptions on how to improve efficiencies while reducing operational costs. The reason why this is on the forefront of IT manager’s minds is simple — they are faced with many common challenges in today’s challenging economic environment.
- High operational costs and the pressure to deliver more with current budgets
- Low-system utilization, associated with applications that have not been virtualized, immobile and consuming corporate resources because of the risks associated with the movement of legacy applications to a Hyper-V virtualized or cloud environment
- Inconsistent agility, speed and availability due to the complexity of aging legacy systems
This is where Dell and Microsoft have invested the greatest amount of attention and resources. Microsoft ensures a software ecosystem that starts with applications, operating systems, virtual environments and cloud infrastructure management. Dell provides the latest in technologies in an infrastructure solution with vStart, validated to run demanding workloads with the essential plug-ins and services to ensure a rapid return on investment.
As foundational building components for vStart solutions, Dell has engineered the fastest, most powerful PowerEdge servers, the most comprehensive and capable storage solutions with Compellent and EqualLogic and an agile data center network fabric with Force 10 networking. Dell integrates solutions, sized right, for
small, medium and large environments with the vStart family. These are built in the Dell factory, leaving the last 10 feet of deployment and configuration at the customer site by a Dell professional. This ensures that data centers can leverage Dell’s solution engineering, while having the vStart solution custom integrated into their environment.
As a show sponsor, Dell took the opportunity to present the latest in the vStart family — the vStart 1000. The new vStart 1000 is the fastest performing, most scalable vStart for mid and large sized data centers. It’s designed with the flexibility and agility required for the latest cloud infrastructure demands. The vStart 1000 is based on Dell’s 12th Generation PowerEdge M620 blade servers, Dell Compellent Fibre Channel storage and 10GbE Force 10 switches. As with all of the vStarts, Dell includes management plug-ins to consolidate the management of the virtual and physical infrastructure from a common management tool.
Dell and Microsoft worked together in preparation for this release. The Microsoft Fast Track Private Cloud Certified vStart 1000 offers one of the most comprehensive cloud environments for customers who scale from a virtual infrastructure to a private cloud deployment.
During the show, we had the pleasure of demoing the vStart 1000 to existing customers and partners as well as all of our new friends who were interested in learning more about Dell’s innovative approach using standards based technologies to implement a cloud.
To learn more about the Dell vStart 1000, visit
marketing.dell.com/Convergence. Also, read more about the announcement here.