Dell unveils a comprehensive set of cloud underpinnings
At customer events today in San Francisco, London, Dubai, and Sydney, Dell is taking the wraps off of blade servers, storage systems and other products aimed at grabbing a larger share of the data center market, an arena that Cisco entered just last week.
More specifically, Dell's new products include five new EqualLogic PS 6000 storage arrays and the NX4 network-attached storage (NAS) system, along with M-Series blade servers, Precision workstations, two new service offerings, and the Dell Management Console, a console designed for managing both Dell and non-Dell data center hardware.
With new support for RAID 6, the storage arrays include a redesigned controller offering a fourth GbE port. One of the arrays brings first-time support from Dell for a solid state disk array. The arrays also sport a new storage management interface called SAN Management Headquarters.
"Think of this as a flight instrument panel that allows systems admins to oversee [EqualLogic], monitor for hot spots, and optimize their deployment," illustrated Darren Thomas, VP and general manager for storage at Dell.
In addition to the previously supported VMware and Citrix hypervisor environments, the new PS 6000 systems work with Microsoft's hypervisor environment on the Windows side through the inclusion of Microsoft Hyper-V Smart Copy snapshot support.
"This gives customers the ability to recover Hyper-V virtual machines in as little as seconds," Thomas contended.
Dell's new NX4, which is available immediately, "supports Windows, Linux and Unix file data and helps consolidate disparate storage systems by offering connectivity to NAS, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel solutions," Thomas said in a blog post today.
As for the new servers, it might be more accurate to say that they're being pre-announced. There will be five of them, and details will be forthcoming next week, according to Ryan Shopp, global channel marketing director.
Cisco's announcement last week of its Unified Computing System (UCS) could have sparked Dell to spring as much news as possible right away, as analysts told Betanews this week. By contrast, Dell is adhering to a mainstream data center model. But still, Dell is breaking new ground for itself by engineering its new cloud underpinnings for closer integration with each other, analysts suggested.