Dell Offers Wide Range of Converged Infrastructure Choices; from Office-Scale to Hyper Scale
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At its customer and partner event, Dell today announced further differentiation to its converged infrastructure portfolio to help customers of all sizes address a common set of challenges related to the complexity, inefficiency and rigidity in current IT infrastructure. The new solutions can be tailored for specific application and workload use cases, and today, Dell is bringing enterprise-class converged technology to a whole new set of customers: branch office companies and the small and medium business market.
Dell is on the forefront of helping a broad range of customers with an array of converged and pre-integrated solutions, each designed to address these different customers’ common needs for simplicity and agility. In fact, a recent IDC forecast reveals that spending on converged systems will grow at a compound annual rate of more than 54 percent over the 2011-2016 forecast period, driven by the cost advantages and efficiency related to operations and management of IT, simplification of vendor engagement, and faster time to productivity with IT system updates.
“Dell’s customer-inspired innovation is driven by our deep understanding of the business realities impacting customers today, and interpreting those trends through delivery of modern IT architectures conceived and engineered for the needs of different businesses – one size does not fit all,” said Marius Haas, president of enterprise solutions for Dell. “With the new solutions we have unveiled today, Dell is demonstrating its differentiated approach to solution development for customers of all sizes – from the small office of five people to the world’s largest hyperscale datacenters.”
To date, workload and application-centric IT infrastructure has been engineered for large enterprises, and does not address the needs of quickly growing remote/branch office (ROBO) or small-to-medium business (SMB) customers. According to , U.S. small businesses and startups are more optimistic and planning to grow their companies in the near future and consider access to technology as key to successful growth. Despite this anticipated growth, most businesses surveyed say technology supports day-to-day operations, while only a moderate percentage view technology as a strategic asset. However, the technology solutions often used by these customers – particularly within , retail and banking industries – and channel partners lack the flexibility, scalability, and ease of management necessary to grow efficiently and compete with larger organizations.
Dell’s heritage is built on delivering IT solutions that scale to customers of all sizes. Following that customer focus, , a Private Cloud in a Box and the first converged IT solution designed specifically for remote and small office environments, with enterprise-class capabilities in a desk-side, space-saving design. to:
Extending Dell’s leadership direction in high performance computing (HPC) and life sciences, Dell announced , an HPC solution uniquely designed to meet the needs of genomic data collection and analysis. This solution is based on to reduce genomics analysis time from one week to one day with an HPC solution designed specifically for the world’s first personalized medicine clinical trial for pediatric cancer.
With recent advancements in low-cost genome sequencing systems and widespread availability of mature analysis software and datasets, the computational and data storage requirements of genomic research have become a primary bottleneck in the effort to engineer and exploit scientific breakthroughs across a wide variety of fields such as cancer therapy, drug design, forensics, biofuels, and agriculture.
The Dell Active Infrastructure for HPC Life Sciences solution enables organizations, researchers and clinicians to accelerate time-to-insight with an easy-to-deploy, open standards-based HPC architecture designed for performance, scalability and efficiency. With this new solution, customers can:
Building on , today Dell its next wave of converged infrastructure offerings – Active Infrastructure 1.1 – to help organizations accelerate the delivery of business applications and IT services, improve data center efficiency and strengthen IT service quality. The updated Active Infrastructure portfolio includes:
Dell’s Data Center Solutions (DCS) practice is launching a new version of its award-winning modular architecture, which incorporates Dell PowerEdge servers, with increased operational capacity and flexibility. This new solution builds upon the innovation and engineered into existing technology, expanding capability and choice for rapidly evolving hyperscale customer IT requirements.
The next-generation Dell MDC helps customers operating scale-out data centers to quickly and cost-effectively deploy resources, compared to raised-floor data centers. The Dell MDC is a hyper-efficient data center consisting of individual power, IT and cooling modules that simply snap together. As required, customers can scale capacity of their MDC with additional modules. Dell’s new MDC architecture enables:
“For patients with advanced cancer, imagine the anguish of waiting weeks for a treatment decision,” said Dr. Jeffrey Trent, president and research director of the Translational Genomics Research Institute. “Dell's technology reduces the time it takes us to analyze a cancer patient’s DNA information from days to hours, enabling TGen and the oncologists we work with to compress the overall process of clinical decision-making. Through genomic analysis, Dell is demonstrating the power of IT in molecular medicine with innovations that accelerate scientific breakthroughs and catalyze tremendous improvements in medical care.”
“With six airports in the Indianapolis metropolitan area that service more than 7 million passengers each year, our small IT team was looking for ways to improve data center efficiency, streamline operations and strengthen IT service quality,” said Joseph Miller, IT director at Indianapolis Airport Authority. “Dell’s Active Infrastructure portfolio provided the efficiency, scalability and flexibility to better serve business needs. By leveraging the single management console of Active System Manager and Dell’s unique hardware strengths, we’ve reduced our server deployment time from three days to less than one hour, seen a 20 percent reduction in administrative staff costs and consolidated five rows of equipment to three racks. The efficiencies we’ve achieved have allowed us to focus our efforts on strategic projects that will drive increased revenue for the airport authority.”
“Emerson Process Management customers are increasingly demanding virtualization technology because it makes it easier and more efficient for them to install, run and expand our process automation systems in their operations, particularly in remote locations,” said David Imming, vice president of product and services marketing for Emerson Process Management, a global manufacturing and technology company whose customers run highly sophisticated and complex process operations. “To date, virtualization technologies have required expensive, time-consuming and complex server technology installations. Emerson’s early tests of the new Dell PowerEdge VRTX show that it significantly reduces the time, costs, footprint and IT expertise needed for our customers to run and expand their process automation systems. This complements Emerson’s vision and our focus on Human Centered Design to help our customers get the greatest value from their technology investments and operate their facilities safer, more reliably and with reduced complexity.”
Results based on May 2013 testing performed on Dell products by Solutions Performance Analysis lab using identical initial deployment configuration.
Source: IDC, Worldwide Converged Systems 2013-2016 Forecast: Adoption Fueled by Fast Time-to-Market Demands, Doc #237979, Nov 2012.
Results based on May 2013 internal Dell HPC lab benchmark testing confirming 38.9 genomes per day throughput on an Active Infrastructure for HPC Life Sciences configuration across 480 cores.
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