Dell Offers Wide Range of Converged Infrastructure Choices

Dell Offers Wide Range of Converged Infrastructure Choices; from Office-Scale to Hyper Scale

· New solutions optimised for applications and workloads from branch office to scale-out data center

· “Private Cloud in a Box,” the PowerEdge VRTX eliminates the complexity, cost and sprawl of disparate IT devices and multiple management tools

· High performance life sciences solution helps bring enhanced medical treatments to market

· Dell updates Active Infrastructure portfolio; reduces time provisioning new workloads by approximately 99 percent.1

· Next generation of Dell Modular Data Center infrastructure expands capacity and customer flexibility

AUCKLAND, New Zealand, June 6, 2013 – This week Dell has 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 forecast2 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.”

Office-scale: Dell PowerEdge VRTX

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 research commissioned in 2013 by Dell and Intel, 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 healthcare, retail and banking industries – and channel partners lack the flexibility, scalability, and ease of management necessary to grow efficiently and compete with larger organisations.

Dell’s heritage is built on delivering IT solutions that scale to customers of all sizes. Following that customer focus, Dell introduces PowerEdge VRTX, 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. Dell PowerEdge VRTX enables customers and partners to:

· Experience greater simplicity: With servers, storage, networking and management converged into a single compact chassis, PowerEdge VRTX uses up to 86 percent fewer cables and can save customers time, compared to installing individual task-specific systems. In addition it can eliminate the complexity, cost and sprawl of disparate external devices and multiple management tools.

· Realise improved efficiency: Experience enhanced productivity with updates to Dell OpenManage Essentials for PowerEdge VRTX which include comprehensive, remote, agent-free systems management capabilities with a new geographical view of distributed IT assets that can help save time and reduce potential for error. Bundled with each PowerEdge VRTX system is Dell’s Chassis Management Controller (CMC) embedded console, for unified and streamlined control over server, storage and networking components.

· Achieve greater value with a pre-configured solution: Dell PowerEdge VRTX addresses a need among channel partners for pre-configured, advanced business solutions that can be enhanced with software and services important to customers in vertical industries.

Enterprise-scale: Dell Active Infrastructure for HPC Life Sciences

Extending Dell’s leadership direction in high performance computing (HPC) and life sciences, Dell announced Active Infrastructure for HPC Life Sciences, an HPC solution uniquely designed to meet the needs of genomic data collection and analysis. This solution is based on Dell’s pioneering work with the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) to reduce genomics analysis time from one week to one day with an HPC solution designed specifically for the world’s first personalised 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 organisations, 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:

· Deliver fast and efficient results: process a complete genomic analysis in less than one day by optimising analysis software and workloads across the Active Infrastructure’s clustered blade servers and high performance file system, enabling processing of up to 38 genomes per day and 266 genomes per week3 in a single Active Infrastructure system.

· Empower bioinformatics as a key value enabler: maximise R&D budgets with optimised, cost-effective HPC infrastructure to meet growing demands for genomics compute and storage resources, while maintaining compliance and protecting confidential data using secure, in-house computing resources.

· Maximise workforce productivity: reduce lengthy implementation timelines,overcome the challenges to collect, store and analyse growing genomic data sets, and increase focus on science and patients, not on complex infrastructure management.

Enterprise-scale: Dell Active Infrastructure

Building on Dell’s Active Infrastructure launch in October 2012, this week Dell announced its next wave of converged infrastructure offerings – Active Infrastructure 1.1 – to help organisations accelerate the delivery of business applications and IT services, improve data center efficiency and strengthen IT service quality. The updated Active Infrastructure portfolio includes:

· New validated workloads: Dell is introducing a fast, accurate way for customers to deploy common workloads, including key enterprise applications, virtual desktop and private cloud workloads. By leveraging out-of-the-box and custom workload templates as well as validated reference architectures, administrators can reduce the time and steps to provision new workloads by approximately 99 percent[1].

· Broader Portfolio of Pre-Integrated Systems: Dell is expanding its converged infrastructure platforms and reference architectures to include the Dell Active System 50, Dell Active System 200 and Dell Active System 1000. Together with the previously launched Active System 800, these pre-integrated systems come in multiple sizes depending on customer needs and application requirements, and enable up to six times faster implementation of new virtual infrastructure.

· Enhancements to unified management platform: Dell is announcing Active System Manager 7.1, the management layer for Active System that integrates IP from recently acquired Gale Technologies to automate workload and infrastructure deployment through a single console. Enabling customers to go from eight tools to one, Active System Manager 7.1 features deep virtual integration, including support for the Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere platforms, stateless computing for workload scaling and migrations, rapid infrastructure on-boarding for discovering assets, and a broad compatibility matrix that includes support for Dell and heterogeneous environments.

Hyperscale: Dell Modular Data Center is Next Generation Solution for Scale-Out Data Centers

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 achievements in energy efficiency engineered into existing Modular Data Center (MDC) 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:

· Increased power capacity, supporting one megawatt (1MW) of critical workloads using 100 percent free-air and evaporative cooling.

· High availability with redundant power feeds that support an average rack power capacity of 40 kilowatts.

· Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) with a flexible design that allows hot movement of fully loaded racks.

Additional Quotes:

“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 analyse 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 catalyse tremendous improvements in medical care.”

“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.”

Pricing & Availability:

· PowerEdge VRTX is available June 26, worldwide, priced from $26,000 inc gst NZ (Including Chassis, 2 x blade servers, 3 x 3.5 “ NLSAS Drives, 1GbE Pass through and 3 yrs Next Business Day warranty support).

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