Partnerships are important to Dell. You hear us say that Dell is an open standards and non-proprietary based data center solution provider a lot. But, what does this really mean?
It means that we are focused on doing what it takes to help our customers simplify IT by providing technologies and solutions that meet customers’ very specific business needs. And partners are the cornerstone of this.
Last week, Dell announced an extension of its partnership with Cisco that complements Dell server and storage solutions. Now businesses have a fully coordinated network fabric to gracefully adapt to changing business and application needs. We also partner with Egenera and Scalent to help customers move into data center resource management based on the creation of workload images and server resource pools.
Today, we announced a partnership with Xsigo Systems, a leading provider of I/O virtualization. Dell will now offer the Xsigo I/O Director as an option with its PowerEdge servers and PowerVault storage solutions. Our partnership with Xsigo fills a void in virtualization technology – it adds an important component for full data center virtualization.
We chose to partner with Xsigo because of their focus on open standards. Since data center virtual environments vary (e.g. different hardware platforms), managing I/O can sometimes be complex and challenging. With the addition of the Xsigo virtual I/O product family, we can help our customers manage I/O resources across multiple vendor platforms from a single console – reducing both the operational and capital costs associated with server I/O.
Companies are interested in this solution because of the cost savings, they stay because of the flexibility and they look to the future because of the scalability. The savings our customers, like OPEN Sports, can gain by using a full virtualization solution are significant in environments where servers need a lot of I/O. Companies can save up to 50 percent on capital expense when using I/O virtualization on 24 servers or more. In the same scenario, our customer can eliminates 70 percent of the I/O infrastructure with fewer cards, switches, cables. That reduction in infrastructure means more flexibility in set up and more scalability for the future.
Not all businesses are the same, so a one-size-fits-all approach to IT is just not going to cut it. We partner with best-in-class companies like Xsigo so that we can work with our customers to create IT infrastructures to meet their individual needs.