Archive for the ‘Dell’ Category

Well worth a watch. One of the smartest guys I know on Datacenters…

Disclosure: I work for Dell…

Cool story on the preferred computer of any good sailor – A Dell Latitude XT2 XFR..

Datamation listed Dell in its Top 10 Cloud Computing Vendors to watch

10) Dell: Since Dell is a computer maker that has never focused on software or networking, you might think it’s a stretch to call it a cloud vendor. But Dell very much disagrees. First, it (unsuccessfully) attempted to patent the term cloud computing (which is kind of funny, almost like trying to patent the term datacenter). More successfully, the company launched DCS – Data Center Solutions – to target an audience of businesses that need help configuring a cloud-based datacenter. DCS handles everything from optimization to project management to global consulting. Who says Dell is just a hardware firm? Referring to DCS, Dell CEO Michael Dell toldBusinessweek in 2008 that, “We created a whole new business just to build custom products for those customers. Now it’s a several-hundred-million-dollar business, and it will be a billion-dollar business in a couple of years—it’s on a tear.”

Notable Dell has made a number of acquisitions to build out the software side of its cloud offering, including Everdream (desktop management software), Silverback Technologies (remote monitoring) and Message One (email management). The goal, it appears: provide one-stop shopping for businesses that want to build an automated datacenter running commodity boxes, all optimized for the cloud. That is likely a lucrative strategy.

Sometimes the best ideas are retakes on old ones. Like community buying. We’re taking the “swarm” idea we piloted in Singapore and are piloting it in Canada now. In short, customers can buy in a group and save on select Dell systems. 15 committed buyers brings the Swarm to its lowest possible discounted price. Watch how this works. Cool idea and congrats to the Dell team for getting the second pilot launched.

Good read here. Steve Schuckenbrock, Dell, speaking about the need to reconfigure IT in the Enterprise.

What else can CIOs do to drive down their costs?

The economics of replacing old hardware with new hardware are pretty good. But the real gains are in rationalization of your applications. How many thousands of applications do you need to run the company? Are there alternatives to which you can migrate users instead of retaining so much redundancy? At Dell we had the same problem. I used to run IT here. We had 10,000 applications; we’ve brought that number down by about half, and by the time we’re done, we’ll bring it down into the hundreds.

What did that do for your hardware needs?

We’ve turned off 10,000 physical servers during the past 12 to 18 months and we’ve virtualized about 30% of the x86 infrastructure. That’s what many CIOs are doing now–rationalizing applications; consolidating and standardizing their infrastructure, which could include modernization of hardware; and virtualizing everything. Virtualization has been incubating for awhile. It’s moving from the experimental stage to becoming the norm.