Dell to Invest $1 Billion in Virtual Era Including Storage

Dell Inc. is increasing its investments in new technology solutions and services that will help customers and drive business results in the Virtual Era. In its current fiscal year, Dell will invest $1 billion (USD) to deliver solutions, services and cloud-based delivery options to help customers capture the benefits from new compute and information delivery advancements.
 
"Technology advances, delivery methods and the move to disruptive IT models like cloud are changing the fundamental way businesses operate," said Steve Schuckenbrock, President, Dell Services. "With this transformational shift, businesses are gaining benefits in terms of speed to market and organizational and compute flexibility. Dell is mobilizing to help customers capture these benefits and with today’s announcement is making the power of the cloud accessible to more organizations and users. Dell has made and will continue to make significant investments to deliver technology that helps customers thrive in the Virtual Era."
 
"While there is no doubt that abstraction and consolidation are inevitable realities in the technology industry, the notion of a ‘single-vendor stack’ is unsustainable," said Matt Eastwood, group vice president of IDC’s Enterprise Platform Group. "As companies move to next-generation architectures, customers will want to ensure that they can seamlessly integrate legacy systems and new technologies. Even greenfield operations will want to ensure that their infrastructure can handle heterogeneity since the technology of today will be the legacy of tomorrow."
 
Global Data Centres
Expand Cloud Computing Capabilities
Over the next 24 months, Dell will build multiple efficient data centres around the world to provide its customers access to public and private cloud technologies and its IT outsourcing capabilities. Bringing together Dell’s technology and services prowess with capabilities from its partners, these new data centres will allow customers to take advantage of Infrastructure-, Platform- and Virtual Desktop-as-a-Service offerings as well as IT outsourcing.

Dell’s customers will now be able to:

• Provide provisioning and scalability flexibility and alignment of costs to use application development and testing or scalable hosting of externally facing applications through flexible Compute-as-a-Service
• Make unlimited storage available for production environments, off-premise back up and disaster recovery with Storage-as-a-Service
• Energise application development and testing environments to quickly provision systems with Platform-as-a-Service
• Centralise, secure and more easily manage user data while facilitating a more remote and mobile workforce through Virtual Desktop-as-a-Service

New Solution Centres Provide Blueprints for the Future
Dell will open 12 Global Solution Centres this year and is planning 10 more over the next 18 months, to better bring open, capable and affordable solutions to organisations around the world. This global network of solution centres will provide a backdrop for customers to learn about Dell’s industry-focused solutions and domain expertise. At the Global Solution Centres, Dell experts work with customers to help them make better use of their technology budgets so they can invest less on managing their infrastructure and more on technology innovation to grow their business.
 
Through Proof of Concept testing to make sure the solution will work in the customers’ environment and Architectural Design Workshops based on the customers’ business needs, Global Solutions Centres give Dell’s customers and partners another resource to help solve data centre challenges.
 
New Solutions for the Virtual Era
Dell launched new Next Generation Data centre, End-User Computing and Email Archiving solutions that enable efficiency and innovation from the core to the edge.
 
Next Generation Data Centre Computing
Dell vStart: Dell is delivering a new faster path to build virtual infrastructures aimed at accelerating our customers’ journey to cloud computing. Dell vStart accelerates and simplifies virtualization adoption by providing an easy way to purchase a virtual infrastructure solution delivered ready to run physical and virtual workloads. With vStart an entire functioning virtual infrastructure solution is delivered ready to run up to 100 or 200 virtual machines from a single management environment – including Intel Xeon-based Dell PowerEdge servers, Dell EqualLogic storage, Dell PowerConnect switches, deployment services, hypervisors, and essential virtualization management extensions. The infrastructure is delivered pre-assembled to the customer’s site as a single unit, racked and cabled, and directly from the Dell factory. With included initial deployment services, vStart can help customers build out the infrastructure required to host virtual machines. Dell vStart currently supports VMWare and support for other hypervisors is planned in the coming quarters.
 
Dell|Microsoft Management
and Virtualization Solutions Partnership:
Dell and Microsoft announced a three-year strategic initiative to help customers deploy and manage virtualization and private cloud technologies. Management solutions will be based on Dell’s Virtual Integrated System, Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager and Microsoft System Center and will deliver improved integration across the physical, virtual and application layers. Virtualization solutions will be based on Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V, which delivers workload performance and can help lower total cost of ownership. Future jointly-engineered solutions based on Dell’s hardware and virtualization management technologies and Microsoft’s hypervisor and systems management technologies will simplify virtualization management, reduce costs and remove barriers to cloud adoption.
 
Dell offers a single management point for physical and virtual resources that speeds provisioning of heterogeneous hardware in a mixed environment.
 
Intelligent Data Management
Dell’s new Email and File Archive solution helps customers manage the information that is the lifeblood to their organisations. Dell’s end-to-end solution capabilities can help customers address storage optimisation and compliance requirements, while alleviating burdens related to design, implementation, and ongoing management through:

• Pre-configured reference architectures that ease solution design, while allowing for needed customisation based on customer specific requirements.
• All ongoing maintenance and support from a single point of contact, including hardware and software (ISVs included).
• Storage platforms that support massive scalability and ease of use, to protect customer investments and enable them to keep up with rapid data growth.

Dell’s approach maintains customer choice with backup and archiving software providers (Symantec or CommVault), preferred consumption model (cloud or on-premise) and services needed.
 
End-User Solutions
Dell Desktop Virtualization Solutions (DDVS) is a solution portfolio that leverages pre-packaged services with configured and tested hardware and software to help organisations more quickly deploy desktop virtualization. DDVS addresses the design and implementation complexities associated with desktop virtualization and accelerates it so organisations can adapt to the changing dynamics of today’s more mobile and global workforce.
 
Dell Desktop Virtualization Solutions enables customers to support virtually any end-user computing device, anytime, anywhere in a cost-effective, secure and predictable way. The offering helps customers meet business objectives by uniquely analysing how end-user computing is delivered, thereby increasing business agility, enhancing end-user experience and productivity as well as reducing operational costs.
 
Solution Availability:

• The Dell vStart solution is available now in the US, with expected availability in EMEA in Q2. Initial EMEA availability will be in the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Spain.
• The Dell and Microsoft virtualization is currently available worldwide.
• The Dell Email and File Archiving is available in the US, with expected availability in UK, France, Germany, Netherlands in Q2.
• Dell Desktop Virtualization Solutions is available now in the U.S. with expected availability in other countries later this year.