Efficiency and agility in the Dell data center

MANILA, Philippines - Convergence collapses and automates critical administrative tasks to speed up routine tasks and free up experts for higher order needs.

“Dell continues to execute very well, first with strategic additions to its enterprise portfolio and then with timely integration of acquired technologies with these offerings. The company’s ability to seamlessly converge servers, storage and networking provides the substantial value of data center simplicity for IT organizations and their business.”

Sumir Bhatia, enterprise director for Dell South Asia.

With economic growth still uneven and uncertain across the globe, public and private enterprises of all sizes are now more mindful of their capital spending and operational costs. Given the key role technology plays in today’s enterprises, the IT organization is highly expected to exercise this prudence.

Besides keeping a keen eye on spending and running costs, the IT function is also called upon to help create a competitive advantage for their enterprises by delivering applications and IT services to users in a timely manner. Using these applications and services, users — and the business as a whole — can respond quickly to marketplace conditions.

Building infrastructure that can serve up new applications and IT services swiftly, however, can require significant investment in time and effort.

For many enterprises, building infrastructure is not a core competency. Most spend weeks and months working through the selection, procurement, installation and configuration phases.

The need for speed

Some enterprises turn to cloud models to gain agility and speed delivery. Successful cloud participation, however, demands that the base infrastructure is sound and efficient. Not surprisingly, those with legacy systems find they cannot effectively build and deploy a private cloud or utilize public cloud options.

In an attempt to address the challenges they face trying to deliver new applications and IT services to users in double-quick time, enterprises converge whatever IT infrastructure they can.

Up until recently, however, convergence has been limited, primarily occurring at the network, storage and infrastructure administration layers.

The full value of convergence can only come through when the key IT infrastructural elements — compute, storage and networking — are fused together, according to Bhatia.

“Bringing together the key IT elements simplifies the entire infrastructure and makes possible the automation of critical administrative tasks, making infrastructure easier and less costly to manage, and more efficient and agile when it comes to delivering new applications and services.

In addition, such convergence enables dynamic response to end-user needs and workloads, mitigates the explosive growth of data and endpoints, and provides a strong foundation for cloud participation.

Data center in a chassis

To help enterprises move from limited physical convergence to broad and full convergence across compute, storage and networking, Dell offers a range of converged infrastructure solutions.

Fronting these solutions is the Dell Converged Blade Data Center. The solutions combine the Dell power-edged M420, the industry’s only quarter-height blade server.

The recently announced enterprise-class SAN Dell Equal Logic PS-M4110 blade storage array; and Dell Force10 MXL switch, the world’s first 40GbE stacking IOM switch, combine into a single blade chassis. The three converged platforms share a common interface, making configuration and management easy.

The Dell Converged Blade Data Center features an architecture that is totally agent-free with software to install and no operating system dependencies. Modular components make in-chassis scaling up a simple process and multiple Dell Converged Blade Data Center solutions can be implemented side-by-side to scale the overall infrastructure horizontally.

The concept behind the Dell Converged Blade Data Center is similar to that of Formula One pit. The driver pulls in, members of the pit crew refuel, replace tires, repair parts and make adjustments, and the driver accelerates away to maintain his lead or improve his position in the race. The aim: to optimize the car’s performance for the current condition in as little time as possible.

Each crewmember is trained for his role. Not a second is wasted, the various tasks are minutely coordinated, the tools needed are readily at hand, and it all happens in one place, said Bhatia.

Fast track to cloud

Joining the Dell Converged Blade Data Center is the Dell vStart 1000. Targeted at enterprises that want to quickly create or enhance a virtualized IT environment and a rapid, low-risk path to private clouds, the solution leverages, proven, best-of-breed components: Dell Compellent SAN storage, Dell Force10 10GB networking, and Dell’s 12th-generation Power edge blade servers.

Available in two configurations (for Microsoft and VMware hypervisors), the Dell vStart 1000 enables businesses to focus on delivering IT services by taking advantage of Dell’s ability to rapidly provide a pre-integrated, virtualization and private cloud infrastructure while lowering risk from a tried, pretested and certified configuration.

Like the Dell Converged Blade Data Center, the Dell vStart 1000 can be managed from a VMware or Microsoft management console. Using Dell VIS and cloud infrastructure management solutions, enterprises can unify the two converged solutions with non-Dell server storage and networking assets into a common resource pool.

This enables IT managers to provision infrastructure assets and automate their management at every layer — physical or virtual — using their preferred hypervisor.

One component of the Dell VIS Self-service Creator ships with the Dell vStart 1000 and includes a Web-based portal that enables authorized users to select, deploy and manage a customized catalogue of IT applications and resources reducing the time it takes to deploy a workload to just minutes.

Its sister solution, Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager (AIM), simplifies data center management by bringing together heterogeneous hardware offerings and virtualization hypervisors to create virtual pools of resources that are easy to manage. A single administrator can then allocate resource bundles to particular applications workloads.

Besides this just-right provisioning, Dell AIM can be used to simplify consolidation, migration and refreshes, reduce downtime of business-critical applications, and rapidly move workloads and backup data across heterogeneous physical and virtual data centers.

To know about Dell solutions, log on to www.dell.com.