Michael Dell appeared at the annual conference of EMC’s VMware unit, underscoring the Dell’s future and sees companies will use Dell’ to build “private clouds,” where their employees access software programs through the internet. “A big priority for us is making private clouds easy,” Mr. Dell told the VMworld conference.
Cloud computing is changing the economics for technology supplier. Prices have been declining for a decade and its now it’s accelerating and everybody is scrambling.
The combined company will be the leading vendor by revenue in the world-wide $29 billion market supplying hardware to cloud-computing providers. In 2015, Dell and EMC combined garnered 18.2% of the highly fragmented market, according to market watcher International Data Corp. That market is characterized by low-margin hardware.
Beyond hardware, the combined company will need to knit together a diverse group of software offerings from Dell and EMC units including VMware, Pivotal and Virtustream. Pivotal offers services to help software developers create cloud applications; its customers include Ford Motor Co. and General Electric Co. With Virtustream, Dell will get services that help run traditional corporate software programs from vendors such as SAP SE on newer cloud infrastructures.
VMware’s software allows a single computer to run multiple operating systems simultaneously. It is used by 99% of the Fortune 500, offering Dell additional inroads into the data centers run by large customers.
VMware also unveiled new software and services that make it easier for customers to run, manage and secure their applications across different clouds. The company also extended a partnership with IBM, through which more than 500 customers, including Marriott International Inc., use VMware software and services to manage their operations in IBM’s cloud.
In the storage world, IOPS is often viewed as a key metric in the application productivity equation. In the real world, where customers have finite budgets and a driving imperative to optimize value for every dollar they spend, storage performance is as much about economics as it is about IOPS. Our storage systems come in several varieties individually designed to address differing customer needs. Some of our solutions include Solid state drives (SSDs), nearline SAS and Enterprise SATA. Dell’s enterprise-class SSDs are designed around enterprise application I/O (input/output) requirements with the primary attribute focus being on random I/O performance and reliability. SSDs offer exceptional performance; however, compared to hard disk drives (HDDs) they have much less capacity per drive, they are much more expensive and have a write endurance limit.
The Achilles’ heel of SSDs are their write performance. To rewrite an area of an SSD that has already been written, the data must be erased and then written. In order to overcome a portion of the write performance penalty, Dell enterprise SSD found across Dell PowerEdge, EqualLogic and Dell EMC, all employ a practice known as over-provisioning of Flash. This practice keeps native Flash capacity beyond the user-defined capacity, and utilizes the additional space as a scratch pad of sorts to quickly put down application write data on areas of Flash that are already in an erased state. The SSDs perform clean-up functions of this over-provisioned Flash space during time periods typically not impacting application performance. Other offering from us include SAS hard drives which are true dual-port full duplex capable devices. This means that both ports on a Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drive can simultaneously send or receive data (host dependent).
Nearline Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), available in PowerEdge servers and PowerVault enclosures, is an enterprise hard drive combining the head, media and rotational speed of traditional enterprise-class Serial ATA (SATA) drives with the fully capable SAS interface typical of 10K/15K rpm SAS drives. These features provide a clear edge over enterprise SATA drives.
The biggest challenge on the model support availability. The expectation from any CIO is at least for 7 years. How much does Dell provide the same?
Currently, customers have had to choose between technologies that supports either the traditional or new IT approach, limiting their ability to get the most out of their IT solutions. We believe that customers need technology that supports both IT approaches and the flavors in between. We believe that a customer should be Future Ready when they are looking at deploying a certain solution. From our deep knowledge of both traditional and new style IT, we have created a new suite of future-ready data centre solutions designed to make traditional IT more efficient and new paradigm IT more practical. Dell’s future-ready IT model includes technology solutions that are more tightly integrated, bringing server, storage and networking closer together, modular to scale to meet business demand, and software-defined to automate and simplify IT operations and service delivery. The result is customers can gain the Google-, Facebook- and Amazon-like flexibility and efficiency, while working with their existing IT investments, unleashing unprecedented growth and innovation.
Depending on customer workloads and their own personal preferences, ViRSO IT categories customers into two types: one who wants to continue to evolve their current or traditional IT systems and the other prefers a new approach that embraces new models of IT delivery, such as software-defined models, convergence and hyper convergence. Our answer to both is to help customers take an approach that balances current and new IT. We want to make traditional IT more efficient, deliver new IT faster. We want to offer customers with choice and value no matter where they start or what workload they run.
Combination of FLASH disk with SAS & SATA disks will help to increase storage performance with low cost disks. Please explain the performance of Dell with respect to the above-said combination.
SAS and SATA solid-state storage devices offer significantly better performance over standard rotating HDDs. However, their performance can be limited by the latency and bottlenecks inherent in the driver stack. A single Express Flash drive can achieve up to 10.5x more database transactions per second than HDD storage. PCIe solid-state storage (SSS), on the other hand, is directly connected to the PCIe bus. The bus provides a direct connection between the PCIe-SSS and the CPU, as well as system memory. This tightly coupled connection provides a storage environment that has lower latency than a SAS/SATA SSD. For instance, our solution Dell PowerEdge Express Flash PCIe-SSD is a high-performance storage device built with enterprise-class NAND flash designed for solutions requiring low latency, high input/output operations per second (IOPS) and enterprise-class storage reliability and serviceability.
Dell Storage leverages state-of-the-art technologies to help organizations maximize efficiency while reducing storage costs by converging servers and storage. Some businesses are expanding their existing SAN and NAS infrastructure while others are deploying software-defined storage (SDS) solutions with hypervisor-integrated systems and open-source solutions. To meet the demands of I/O intensive workloads, our unique Data Progression technologies enable performance-optimized flash at the price of a hard disk solution.
We help achieve a balance of price and performance with virtualized or traditional IT environments that can leverage the investments already made, thereby reducing TCO. Our solutions are even ideal for your cold data storage as it allows organizations to reduce the overall cost of supporting their data.
Recently, Dell updated its high performance computing portfolio, including the availability of new Dell HPC Systems, early access to innovative HPC technologies, technology partner collaborations, and successful global customer implementations.
While traditional HPC has been critical to research programs that enable scientific and societal advancement, Dell is mainstreaming these capabilities to support enterprises of all sizes as they seek a competitive advantage in an ever increasing digital world,” said Jim Ganthier, vice president and general manager, Dell Engineered Systems, Cloud and HPC. “As a clear leader in HPC, ViRSO IT and Dell now offers customers highly flexible, precision built HPC systems for multiple vertical industries based upon years of experience powering the world’s most advanced academic and research institutions. With Dell HPC Systems, our customers can deploy HPC systems more quickly and cost effectively and accelerate their speed of innovation to deliver both breakthroughs and business results.”
Dell announced the global availability of the Dell HPC Systems portfolio, a family of HPC and data analytics solutions that combine the flexibility of customized HPC systems with the speed, simplicity and reliability of pre-configured systems. Dell engineers and domain experts designed and tuned the new systems for specific science, manufacturing and analytics workloads with fully tested and validated building block systems, backed by a single point of hardware support and additional service options across the solution lifecycle.
Michael Dell appeared at the annual conference of EMC’s VMware unit, underscoring the Dell’s future and sees companies will use Dell’ to build “private clouds,” where their employees access software programs through the internet. “A big priority for us is making private clouds easy,” Mr. Dell told the VMworld conference.
Cloud computing is changing the economics for technology supplier. Prices have been declining for a decade and its now it’s accelerating and everybody is scrambling.
The combined company will be the leading vendor by revenue in the world-wide $29 billion market supplying hardware to cloud-computing providers. In 2015, Dell and EMC combined garnered 18.2% of the highly fragmented market, according to market watcher International Data Corp. That market is characterized by low-margin hardware.
Beyond hardware, the combined company will need to knit together a diverse group of software offerings from Dell and EMC units including VMware, Pivotal and Virtustream. Pivotal offers services to help software developers create cloud applications; its customers include Ford Motor Co. and General Electric Co. With Virtustream, Dell will get services that help run traditional corporate software programs from vendors such as SAP SE on newer cloud infrastructures.
VMware’s software allows a single computer to run multiple operating systems simultaneously. It is used by 99% of the Fortune 500, offering Dell additional inroads into the data centers run by large customers.
VMware also unveiled new software and services that make it easier for customers to run, manage and secure their applications across different clouds. The company also extended a partnership with IBM, through which more than 500 customers, including Marriott International Inc., use VMware software and services to manage their operations in IBM’s cloud.
In the storage world, IOPS is often viewed as a key metric in the application productivity equation. In the real world, where customers have finite budgets and a driving imperative to optimize value for every dollar they spend, storage performance is as much about economics as it is about IOPS. Our storage systems come in several varieties individually designed to address differing customer needs. Some of our solutions include Solid state drives (SSDs), nearline SAS and Enterprise SATA. Dell’s enterprise-class SSDs are designed around enterprise application I/O (input/output) requirements with the primary attribute focus being on random I/O performance and reliability. SSDs offer exceptional performance; however, compared to hard disk drives (HDDs) they have much less capacity per drive, they are much more expensive and have a write endurance limit.
The Achilles’ heel of SSDs are their write performance. To rewrite an area of an SSD that has already been written, the data must be erased and then written. In order to overcome a portion of the write performance penalty, Dell enterprise SSD found across Dell PowerEdge, EqualLogic and Dell EMC, all employ a practice known as over-provisioning of Flash. This practice keeps native Flash capacity beyond the user-defined capacity, and utilizes the additional space as a scratch pad of sorts to quickly put down application write data on areas of Flash that are already in an erased state. The SSDs perform clean-up functions of this over-provisioned Flash space during time periods typically not impacting application performance. Other offering from us include SAS hard drives which are true dual-port full duplex capable devices. This means that both ports on a Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drive can simultaneously send or receive data (host dependent).
Nearline Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), available in PowerEdge servers and PowerVault enclosures, is an enterprise hard drive combining the head, media and rotational speed of traditional enterprise-class Serial ATA (SATA) drives with the fully capable SAS interface typical of 10K/15K rpm SAS drives. These features provide a clear edge over enterprise SATA drives.
The biggest challenge on the model support availability. The expectation from any CIO is at least for 7 years. How much does Dell provide the same?
Currently, customers have had to choose between technologies that supports either the traditional or new IT approach, limiting their ability to get the most out of their IT solutions. We believe that customers need technology that supports both IT approaches and the flavors in between. We believe that a customer should be Future Ready when they are looking at deploying a certain solution. From our deep knowledge of both traditional and new style IT, we have created a new suite of future-ready data centre solutions designed to make traditional IT more efficient and new paradigm IT more practical. Dell’s future-ready IT model includes technology solutions that are more tightly integrated, bringing server, storage and networking closer together, modular to scale to meet business demand, and software-defined to automate and simplify IT operations and service delivery. The result is customers can gain the Google-, Facebook- and Amazon-like flexibility and efficiency, while working with their existing IT investments, unleashing unprecedented growth and innovation.
Depending on customer workloads and their own personal preferences, ViRSO IT categories customers into two types: one who wants to continue to evolve their current or traditional IT systems and the other prefers a new approach that embraces new models of IT delivery, such as software-defined models, convergence and hyper convergence. Our answer to both is to help customers take an approach that balances current and new IT. We want to make traditional IT more efficient, deliver new IT faster. We want to offer customers with choice and value no matter where they start or what workload they run.
Combination of FLASH disk with SAS & SATA disks will help to increase storage performance with low cost disks. Please explain the performance of Dell with respect to the above-said combination.
SAS and SATA solid-state storage devices offer significantly better performance over standard rotating HDDs. However, their performance can be limited by the latency and bottlenecks inherent in the driver stack. A single Express Flash drive can achieve up to 10.5x more database transactions per second than HDD storage. PCIe solid-state storage (SSS), on the other hand, is directly connected to the PCIe bus. The bus provides a direct connection between the PCIe-SSS and the CPU, as well as system memory. This tightly coupled connection provides a storage environment that has lower latency than a SAS/SATA SSD. For instance, our solution Dell PowerEdge Express Flash PCIe-SSD is a high-performance storage device built with enterprise-class NAND flash designed for solutions requiring low latency, high input/output operations per second (IOPS) and enterprise-class storage reliability and serviceability.
Dell Storage leverages state-of-the-art technologies to help organizations maximize efficiency while reducing storage costs by converging servers and storage. Some businesses are expanding their existing SAN and NAS infrastructure while others are deploying software-defined storage (SDS) solutions with hypervisor-integrated systems and open-source solutions. To meet the demands of I/O intensive workloads, our unique Data Progression technologies enable performance-optimized flash at the price of a hard disk solution.
We help achieve a balance of price and performance with virtualized or traditional IT environments that can leverage the investments already made, thereby reducing TCO. Our solutions are even ideal for your cold data storage as it allows organizations to reduce the overall cost of supporting their data.
Recently, Dell updated its high performance computing portfolio, including the availability of new Dell HPC Systems, early access to innovative HPC technologies, technology partner collaborations, and successful global customer implementations.
While traditional HPC has been critical to research programs that enable scientific and societal advancement, Dell is mainstreaming these capabilities to support enterprises of all sizes as they seek a competitive advantage in an ever increasing digital world,” said Jim Ganthier, vice president and general manager, Dell Engineered Systems, Cloud and HPC. “As a clear leader in HPC, ViRSO IT and Dell now offers customers highly flexible, precision built HPC systems for multiple vertical industries based upon years of experience powering the world’s most advanced academic and research institutions. With Dell HPC Systems, our customers can deploy HPC systems more quickly and cost effectively and accelerate their speed of innovation to deliver both breakthroughs and business results.”
Dell announced the global availability of the Dell HPC Systems portfolio, a family of HPC and data analytics solutions that combine the flexibility of customized HPC systems with the speed, simplicity and reliability of pre-configured systems. Dell engineers and domain experts designed and tuned the new systems for specific science, manufacturing and analytics workloads with fully tested and validated building block systems, backed by a single point of hardware support and additional service options across the solution lifecycle.
It is true that SDS is a fast-growing market – with IDC showing the market to be growing at a 21% CAGR from now to 2019. The data does show a decline in spending on traditional external arrays, however these traditional systems still make up the vast majority of the overall spend in the market.
With ever-growing data stores, customers are demanding greater mobility, virtualization, cloud computing as well as ubiquitous data capacity and access while driving down costs. New workloads and computer models are forcing fundamental changes for certain applications in many, but certainly not all, data centers. To better address the business needs of today, organizations are looking for various ways to maximize efficiency while slashing storage costs.
Q- Does moving to SDS storage mean throwing away existing storage hardware investment?
We firmly believe that hardware still matters, but also recognize that organizations value having ready systems that are jointly-engineered, validated, tested and backed by a global service and support. This is not simply loading software onto a box and shipping it. It is a much more involved process that explains the necessity of having an end-to-end vendor where IT departments can enjoy more efficiency, agility, productivity and value to be future-ready.
Q- Does moving to SDS storage mean throwing away existing storage hardware investment?
We believe that organizations looking to evolve their IT infrastructure should not be required to rip and replace existing assets, but rather, be deliberate about building a bridge between legacy IT and innovative technologies to optimize existing IT applications and performance for business growth. The move to SDS should be the same, where the workload determines the configuration and provides organizations with the flexibility to be future-ready.
Q – Is SDS already being over taken by cloud storage?
Regardless of where the data is residing, it needs to be protected, accessible, managed and scalable to meet organizations’ requirements. For the future-ready enterprise, it is important to have the flexibility in ability to deploy and manage applications across SDS, public, private and hybrid cloud solutions.
Q – What are the key drivers that will drive people to implement SDS?
Despite varying definitions, there is a general consensus that SDS can be thought of as a software layer, independent of hardware, providing storage services like thin provisioning, deduplication, replication, snapshots, etc., using industry-standard server hardware. SDS also aims to offer “unlimited” storage capacity with scale-out storage architecture and provide the reliability completely via software without depending on the underlying hardware. This derives two key advantages:
Ability to use industry-standard hardware
Early access to advanced storage features
This means organizations can lower costs by using commodity hardware and add new IT capabilities quickly with faster access to the latest software or hardware advancements. By separating software from hardware, storage admins can achieve high cost effectiveness by programming each workload with various levels of capacity, performance, availability and protection, in real time.
Q – What is unique about your own SDS offering?
Even today, many software-defined approaches can be limiting by tying organizations down to individual solutions for every need. Given the diversity of customers with different workloads and requirements, we firmly believe that it is one-size-fits-none. This is why we have taken a forward-looking approach to SDS by partnering with leading companies like Microsoft, Nexenta, Nutanix, Scality and VMware to offer the industry’s broadest portfolio of SDS solutions. This allows customers to pick the right hardware and software with ViRSO IT and Dell’s industry-standard approach, add new IT capabilities quickly with faster access to the latest software/ hardware, reduce risk and save time with a single contact for service and support to be future-ready.
One SDS solution customers frequently choose is the Dell XC Web-scale Converged Appliance powered by Nutanix. It installs quickly, integrate easily into any data center, and can be deployed for multiple virtualized workloads including desktop virtualization, database and private cloud projects. Customers are also choosing our Dell Nexenta solutions that enable enterprise data centers to meet large-scale capacity requirements cost-effectively and to upgrade as needed, without disruption.
Most recently, we announced an example of our integration with Scality in delivering the SD7000-S, a purpose-built storage server for Scality RING software. As the industry’s densest object storage platform with 172TB of raw capacity per rack unit, it allows more efficient deployment and reduces datacentre power, cooling and rack space.
For over 10 years, ViRSO IT and Dell Solutions has been catering to the technology needs of organizations across an array of industries from all over the world. As a business unit, ViRSO IT builds hardware, software, and services into its customers’ existing systems in order for them to quickly go to market, make a profit, and achieve success.
With the world constantly evolving and technological advancements happening all the time, ViRSO IT is at the forefront of upcoming trends and innovations. It is committed to enabling its customers to do incredible things in the noted industries and to use technology to solve problems that was not considered possible before.
We are leading the Datacentre market, and cover the entire EMEA region. We are aiming to be a transformative force in the efforts to enable and empower our customers, from vertical, proprietary silos to horizontal and open. Our goal is to make the networks future-ready. We do this by delivering specific Blue Print expertise and long-established relationships, as well as actively participating in the community-developing functional solutions with sanctioned use case Proof Of Concepts
As a leader in both Software Defined solutions and x86 technologies, we are paving the way with our kite marked solutions.
Recently a new innovation lab for SAP HANA was unveiled, intended to help its customers evaluate the SAP HANA in-memory relational database management system (RDBMS) and SAP S/4HANA business suite.
Dell and ViRSO IT would show customers the lab will also include a co-innovation lab to help customers develop and test solutions, and temporarily use the environment for upgrades and rollout projects. ViRSO IT and Dell are also offering a set of consulting services around the innovation lab to help customers identify potential value, create a business use case and develop zero-impact migration plans.
“A lot of our existing SAP customers we service have questions,” says Simon Spence, global director of the Dell SAP practice, Dell Services. “They need to identify what their roadmap needs to be making of this transformation: why they would do it, when they would do it, how would they do it.”
The innovation lab consists of a virtual environment that will help customers answer those questions, allowing them to evaluate the environment before making an acquisition decision, and then jumpstart development after the acquisition of licenses. The lab is built on the latest and greatest Dell hardware running HANA, placed in the Dell cloud environment, with 30 TB of capacity that can support 20 to 25 customers at any one time.
That capacity can be used to fully configure solutions for prototyping or proof of concepts. It offers a personalized user experience that encompasses mission-critical business processes from sales and finance to manufacturing and procurement. Customers can jumpstart and fine-tune solutions to benchmark performance results and facilitate rapid adoption. In addition, Spence notes that the lab serves as an accelerator for applications like analytics and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).
The lab can do demonstrations with a preconfigured S/4 environment that allows customers to understand the environment’s capabilities.
Lambeth Borough Council have decided to invest in Dell Equallogic for their Storage and VMware environment.
Key updates and enhancements to include:
- Flexible, non-disruptive storage options including flash-optimized solutions that offer flash at the price of disk, enable your data center to grow seamlessly without forklift upgrades.
- Simultaneous iSCSI, Fibre Channel (FC) and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) front-end interconnects
- Controls SAS and FC drive enclosures, including those with write-intensive SLC and read-intensive MLC SSDs
- Scales up to 960 SAS drives in multiple enclosures per dual-controller system and scales-out to many systems across numerous sites, monitored by a single console
- Seamlessly integrates with the FS8600 NAS appliance for fully interoperable block and file storage solutions.
- Enhanced performance and density
- Experience the combined benefits of Dell Compellent architecture and a resilient Dell hardware design that offers improved performance and increased memory over previous generation Dell Compellent controllers.
2U rack chassis with dual six-core, 2.5GHz (with Turbo) Intel® Xeon® E5-2640 CPUs
16GB2 to 64GB2 total available cache per controller, with a maximum 128GB2 per dual controller system (a dual controller configuration is required to support full high-availability and failover capabilities in production environments)
Six PCIe Gen3-enabled expansion slots to extend I/O capabilities for future growth
Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC7 Enterprise) to add hardware and environmental monitoring capabilities to the Storage Center Solution
Storage Center Operating System 64-bit support for improved scalability and performance
Intuitive software
Go beyond basic storage and optimize your data with the active, intelligent management capabilities of Storage Center firmware and the Dell Compellent integrated software feature set. Built-in automation, enhanced support for enterprise-class workloads and optimized design for flash-based environments helps improve the provisioning, placement and protection of data throughout its lifecycle.
Straightforward software upgrades and perpetual software licensing enable consistent, seamless growth.
Allows the Dell Compellent Storage Center to reach performance levels over 300,000 IOPS3.
Achieve greater than 100,000 IOPS with sub-millisecond latency when running OLTP workloads4.
Dynamic Capacity allows thin provisioning of any size virtual volume without consuming physical capacity until data is written to disk.
Data Instant Replay ensures that once an initial snapshot of a volume is taken, only incremental changes in data need to be captured.
Data Progression writes active blocks of data to Tier 1 storage while automatically migrating inactive blocks of data to lower-tier storage with high protection.
Fast Track places data on the appropriate tracks within individual hard drives in the drive enclosures.
Enterprise Manager simplifies network storage management by providing a single, centralized console for administering multiple local and remote Storage Center SANs.
Remote Instant Replay provides continuous data protection by replicating only incremental changes in data following initial site synchronization. This method of Thin Replication helps keep hardware expenses in check.
Live Volume allows moving and sharing storage volumes between two separate systems without disruption.