Dell tackles ‘complexity’ with virtualisation products

Although many businesses are already well down the road when it comes to virtualisation, Dell claims complexity needed to be removed from the technology and it was the company to do it.

At a launch held in London today, the hardware company announced a number of new products and services to address the area, with several partners on board.

The headline launch was the Dell vStart, a rack-based server which comes loaded with either 100 or 200 virtual machines to make the implementation of virtualisation a one-buy solution. The idea is to pick your size, place your order and then it will arrive ready made and pre-tested for your datacentre.

"A virtual machine might sound simple... but actually it is more complicated because you have to add storage, networking, management; integrating all of those can be quite difficult," said Praveen Asthana, vice president of storage and networking at Dell.

"[vStart] has everything you need to run them all fully loaded and ready to go, including management and services. The key here is make virtualisation simple, for both the SMB to a very large customer."

The 100 VM model, however, only has one array, making it a nervous choice for those running mission-critical applications.

It currently uses Equalogic storage but executives admitted its recent Compellent acquisition would see a new version incorporating that technology instead.

Dell was set on continuing the "open, capable and affordable" attitude it has been promoting for quite some time, so it offered an extra choice for customers when it came to what was built into vStart.

Although it will initially ship with a VMware hypervisor, interested parties will be able to run a multi-hypervisor environment, using VMware, Microsoft's Hyper-V or even Xen.

"Today there isn't a lot of choice in the world and we want to make sure as part of our open strategy... that choice is there," added Asthana.

Going forward, the company will be looking at application specific vStarts, as well as the idea of a private cloud offering "in a box," he added.

Next up was desktop virtualisation.

"We are now at the fifth time virtualised desktops should be ruling the earth," joked Bryan Jones, marketing director for public and large enterprise at Dell. "Why are we not there yet?

He believed the technology now had "scale and scope" though and Dell wanted to offer it as a service for customers, running from its datacentres, to remove implementation complexity.

Of course, Dell will happily come into offices and set it up on premise if that is a company's preference, but it hopes by offering it over a cloud model, more companies may be encouraged.

New global centres

To support these new offerings, Dell is expanding its worldwide presence with an investment of $1 billion (600 million). This will go towards both extra datacentres and what it refers to as global solutions centres.

There will be a further ten data centres opened worldwide. Although the exact locations were kept secret, Eric Velfre, director of enterprise in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), claimed there would be a "good number" based within Europe to support the cloud services on offer.

However Logan McLeod, director of public cloud at Dell, admitted the company would "not be going after the credit card swiping customers" like Amazon when it came to its Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering, housed within the datacentres.

When it comes to global solutions centres, there will be a further 12 although this is a mixture of refurbished centres and brand new facilities. The purpose is to house all the up-to-date technology, along with engineers from the company, so prospective customers have somewhere to go and test out options, as well as ask questions around both the technology and services.

The UK will not be getting one but Limerick, Paris and Frankfurt will be the beneficiaries in Europe.