Dell Hits Home Run With Virtual Era And Health Care Solutions

On March 24th, 2010, Dell stepped up to the plate in the virtual era solutions ball game and hit a home run with their announcements and positioning of new products and services offerings. The company was well prepared and came laced up and ready to play at the Bently Reserve in San Francisco where they made their announcements and provided a partner roundtable discussion that demonstrated support for the new Dell products and solutions. In the health care space, Dell announced the new Dell Medical Archiving Solution, which includes a new high-performance computing PowerEdge server along with object storage, connectivity and deployment support via partners and implementation support via Dell Perot services. 

From the server perspective, Dell announced the new PowerEdge C6100, which is geared specifically for HPC, Web 2.0 and gaming environments and for high-density computing that consumes less energy overall.  They also discussed support for a QLogic Pass-Through module that connects to the blade server's InfiniBand mezzanine card and then externally to any industry-standard InifiBand switch. The Pass-Through module enables lower power consumption at the blade level, compared to installing an energy-inefficient InfiniBand switch card into the blade severs.

Recognizing the unique storage requirements for the medical imaging demands within health care today, Dell has developed and announced the new DX Object Storage Platform. I spent some time speaking with Dell's Darren Thomas, General Manger of Storage Business, and he explained that the DX consists of a Dell sever and OS designed for medical image object storage. Darren explained that the DX is built upon advanced PCI architecture and will support massive storage scale-out. The system strives to be green by spinning down disk drives as it determines usage on specific disks. (For disk drives that have been turned off, these drives will be turned on, spun up, and every object will be checked for data integrity on a weekly basis)

There is no doubt that Dell is serious, ready and committed to moving forward in the Health Care space.  Clearly, the company views the explosion of content within medical imaging as a prime business opportunity, and in my opinion, users in this market should give serious consideration to the new Medical Archiving Solutions.  Don't forget to ask for references.

Also on the 24th, Dell announced that it has expanded its OEM relationship with EMC and will OEM the EMC Data Domain deduplication products and NS Series Unified NAS/SAN supporting storage line. The Dell Data Domain series consists of models DD140, DD610 and DD630.  The NS series includes the EMC line up of NS-120, NS-480, and NS960.  Dell has smartly included the small to large dedupe and multi-protocol NAS/SAN storage solutions in its product portfolio as it moves forward in its efforts to tackle internal and external cloud compute and storage requirements. All the OEM EMC products will be Dell-branded and carry the Dell logo plates on the product. This indicates that Dell is focused on supplying products with proven market acceptance and that can assist Dell in delivering turn-key solutions.Announcements on the 24th also included Dell's expansion into the virtual era by raising the curtain on a number of solutions and services that bring it front and center in the competitive environment of cloud computing. At the announcement event in San Francisco, Dell assembled an impressive group of strong, well established partners with whom it will work to develop and deploy cloud computing solutions.  These partners included Brocade, Citrix, EMC, Microsoft and VMware. These companies had senior level representatives involved in a panel discussion along with Dell's Steve Schuckenbrock, president of Dell Large Enterprise. The strength of commitment by Dell's cloud initiative partners was evident by their presence at the event and by their words of support for Dell's endeavors in this area. 

It's clear that primary server vendors (Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM) are forming their alliances, releasing their cloud initiatives and are working with strategic hardware partners while seeking to leverage and display strong relationships with the major server virtualization players (VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix). Dell is clearly letting no moss grow under its feet with partner alignment and initiative development and launch. 

The new solutions, systems and services announced by Dell on the 24th include new cloud infrastructure solutions consisting of pre-tested and assembled hardware, software and services for public and private cloud builders. The well-known Dell Data Center Solutions group will facilitate these new solutions.

Dell also announced a new Cloud Partner Program for independent software vendors (ISVs) that offers customers the ability to purchase and deploy cloud solutions from trusted providers utilizing Dell best practices. This is a plus for customers who have long standing relationships with ISVs and who rely on them for rapid development and deployment. 

The company also introduced Dell Cloud Services which provides consulting, deployment and support plans that Dell believes will assist their customers with easier management and reduced complexity when deploying cloud infrastructures. Given that public and private cloud construction is well underway, a services option may be a good choice for a customer who needs to deploy quickly, or who needs unique and specialized management and support options.New Open Solutions for the virtual environment, announced at the Bently Reserve, include Intelligent Data Management solutions that manage data throughout its life cycle. For example, from the creation of a new object stored on the DX product to eventual archiving of the data for long-term retention.

Overall, Dell announced quite a wide variety of products, services and solutions.  Dell was clear that they will fully utilize their acquisitions of Perot Systems and KACE to power its ability to provide end-to-end Open and Virtual Solutions. Setting aside any question of whether the acquisitions would be instrumental in Dell's future, they certainly will be heavily utilized. 

Clearly, Dell has been working diligently to build strong alliances with key suppliers in order to make an impressive announcement of how - and with whom - it will move forward in the rapidly growing virtual, cloud and health care markets. The challenge for Dell, as with others, will be how well they manage their alliances and partnerships in order to execute on delivery of all these new solutions and products. If the organization and execution of the announcement is an indicator of a Dell that is focused and ready to play ball, then the we are about to see the company hit more home runs as it executes in this area over the next few years.