Thursday 29 July 2010
Addressing the desire to simplify and standardize the data center, Dell today unveiled additions to its efficient enterprise portfolio at the VMworld ‘09 conference. Dell announced new desktop, networking, and virtualization management partnerships that can allow businesses to reduce the cost and time associated with the deployment and ongoing management of desktop and data center virtual environments.
“The growing desire for increased enterprise efficiency, combined with the rapid evolution and adoption of virtualized, standards-based architectures is changing the way enterprise technology is built and deployed,” said Praveen Asthana, vice president of Dell Enterprise Storage and Networking, in his presentation at VMworld 09. “The future of enterprise computing does not lie in a proprietary, monolithic stack. Businesses are looking to drive efficiency and innovation and products from Dell help drive these gains while avoiding vendor lock in. The next-generation datacenter – or the Efficient Datacenter – will be standards-based from the compute to the networking fabric, fully virtualized and cloud enabled, and highly automated.”
Adhering to the philosophy of open, pragmatic and end-to-end, Dell’s datacenter approach is designed to enable choice in IT deployment, management and automation so that businesses can focus on their core competencies. This occurs in part due to Dell’s philosophy of designing business ready configurations which are engineered, architected and pre-built product offerings designed to work together and accelerate deployments. When coupled with Dell’s approach and perspective on enterprise computing – from the desktop to the datacenter and out to the cloud – the company is uniquely positioned to help business drive efficiency in the datacenter.
The News
Together with key partners, Dell is building a unified datacenter environment that is built on standards, highly virtualized and easy to manage:
* Today Dell expanded its OEM relationship with Brocade. Specifically, the two companies intend to:
o Develop a dynamic infrastructure and optimization solution enabled by virtualization to allow customers to deploy and manage an efficient data center. Increasingly, customers need applications deployed rapidly to meet their performance requirements, with secure and reliable access to their mission-critical data.
o Deliver integrated toolsets to manage application delivery and deployment as business services on highly reliable compute, network and storage infrastructure. The Brocade and Dell solution will help provide capital and operational expense savings by deploying server and storage virtualization more broadly across the data center.
* Dell is simplifying the deployment and management of virtual environments by delivering an OEM version of Scalent’s V/OE, an open infrastructure management solution.
o Dell customers can avoid many of the common, repetitive IT tasks associated with deploying and managing virtual environments. The Scalent architecture is consistent with Dell’s approach in that it does not lock-in customer to a specific technology, putting the control of IT infrastructure back into the hands of businesses.
o The Dell and Scalent solution is open and flexible, creating a more efficient way to manage virtual and physical infrastructures and create a foundation for cloud computing.
Dell is also helping customers drive efficiency and effectiveness in distributed computing environments through desktop virtualization. Dell’s Flexible Computing strategy uses client-server (network based) computing and virtualization technologies to improve manageability, data security, compliance and disaster recovery.
* Dell today announced that it has expanded its Flexible Computing portfolio by incorporating VMware VIEW into its Virtual Remote Desktop solution. Now IT managers can run virtual desktops in the datacenter, while giving end users a single view of all their applications and data in a familiar, personalized environment on any device at any location.
datacore software
DataCore Software, the leading provider of storage virtualization, business continuity and disaster recovery software solutions, today announced that External IT, a hosted IT-as-a-service company serving the needs of the small and medium enterprise virtual workforce, has standardized on DataCore’s SANsymphony storage virtualization software to serve as their storage area network (SAN) of choice for its business and thereby for its clients and its reseller partners too. With VMware virtual servers, Citrix XenApp and DataCore storage virtualization, External IT is able to deliver a complete virtualization infrastructure in the form of private computing “clouds,” tailored individually to a specific client’s needs.
“I was first exposed to DataCore at a Brian Madden conference,” said Joseph Stedler, senior engineer and Dallas data center manager, External IT. “In fact the first thing I saw was one of DataCore’s ‘Pimp My Storage’ tee-shirts. The gimmick intrigued me and when I found out from a DataCore representative just how DataCore could ‘pimp my storage’ my reaction was that if DataCore is what I think it is, then this is a fundamental shift – for the better – in terms of SAN technology. The deficiencies that are inherent to traditional SANs are overcome by the DataCore virtual SAN, software-based approach.”
External IT bases its business around VMware and Citrix as a hosting platform for the services and solutions it provides. Moreover, External IT embraces a cloud computing model to deliver its services – meaning that External IT clients are completely independent of their own offices. External IT underwent an exhaustive search of SAN vendors, including Compellent, EMC, NetApp, IBM, EqualLogic as well as DataCore. The directive was to pick the best SAN for External IT to deploy – one that would be the most reliable, flexible, powerful and cost-effective.
Key to achieving this directive was meeting The Mirazon Group, an IT solutions provider and strategic partner of DataCore. The partner was able to demonstrate just how DataCore met all the key characteristics External IT was looking for in a SAN – reliability, flexibility, cost-effectiveness – as well as introduce the firm to even more benefits inherent to DataCore’s software-based storage virtualization solutions – value that constitutes the “DataCore Difference.”
The Solution: Built on DataCore
When the dust settled from an exhaustive vetting process, External IT selected DataCore’s SANsymphony as its de facto SAN, responsible for serving as a universal storage controller and enabling the company to get the most out of its storage with its software-based storage virtualization approach. Now, all of the applications that an External IT client may need are hosted out of External IT’s data center via Citrix and the infrastructure all relies on DataCore, which is the backbone of it all.
Stedler summarizes the value of a storage virtualization approach as follows, “I have worked with traditional SANs for eight years and have had firsthand experience with every major hardware SAN under the sun – EMC, HP, NetApp, etc.” he said. “There are various, major drawbacks to hardware SANs. One is the fact that there is a single point of failure at the disk level. This is particularly the case when doing, for example, firmware upgrades – on the controllers, on the disks, on the shelves – whereby you have to take the SAN down to perform that task. The second most irksome characteristic of hardware SANs is their cost. These EMC SANs, these HP EVAs are inherently expensive, particularly during upgrade time.”
The Value of DataCore: Uptime, Performance and Much More
“There are capabilities that DataCore brings to the table that I absolutely love,” commented Stedler. “The concept of having two SANs as your one SAN environment is just elegantly simple. You have an ‘A’ side and a ‘B’ side.” The beauty of this is that if you need to do hardware maintenance or firmware upgrades, an administrator can actually take down half of the SAN and still have the other half serving production traffic – completely uninterrupted. The second, major benefit of DataCore for External IT has to do with performance. “With DataCore, you will experience enormous performance gains,” noted Stedler. “The performance that DataCore delivers is nothing short of awesome.”
Other benefits that make up the “DataCore Difference” for External IT include Seamless Maintenance, Disaster Recovery (through asynchronous replication) and the Flexibility to create your own SANs.
Free 30-day trial – Try DataCore Today!
For a free 30-day test drive, please visit: www.datacore.com/trialsoftware.
About External IT
External IT is the only hosted IT-as-a-service company to serve the needs of the small and medium enterprise virtual workforce with easy access to, and management of, all applications, data, email and collaboration through a web-based portal. Whether working from headquarters, a remote office, home or from the road, all you need is a PC or Mac and Internet access.
For companies that are growing, consolidating, or reorganizing; new users, groups, departments and locations can instantly be added, trained and supported anywhere in the world. Disaster recovery and business continuity are now affordable for everyone. Since all your applications, files and email run from our data centers instead of your local computer, we can protect all users from local interruptions (weather, computer/desktop failures, and travel issues). In the event of a data center disaster, our intelligent system redirects users from their preferred to their failover data centers with no change to the end user experience.
External IT provides full turnkey hosted IT Outsourcing, supplying companies with an enterprise-level IT department as one single integrated solution. External IT services the day-to-day needs of delivering IT to users. Each customized solution is built upon business and productivity application hosting, server management, network management, software maintenance, provisioning, security, training, backup, disaster recovery, and help desk. Visit http://www.externalIT.com.
About DataCore Software
DataCore Software, the leading provider of storage virtualization SAN software, fundamentally changes the economics of managing storage with innovative software that combines advanced functions and services with the agility and savings of hardware independence. DataCore lowers the cost and complexity of IT by making storage efficient, fast, flexible, fail-safe and virtual. DataCore’s portable storage server software simplifies and automates capacity expansion and centralizes storage management for Windows, UNIX, Linux, MacOS, NetWare, VMware and other leading open system and virtual server platforms. DataCore is privately held and its corporate headquarters are in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. For more information, call (877) 780-5111 or visit www.datacore.com.
