Dell expands virtualisation support

Dell has announced an expanded portfolio of products aimed at helping organisations implement a virtualisation strategy, including new servers, storage hardware and services.

The company said that its products are standards-based and do not lock customers in, but offer a complete end-to-end solution of products certified for compatibility with the leading virtualisation platforms.

"We've built an entire end-to-end solution for virtualisation, but not everyone buys all their infrastructure from Dell, so our solution is built on open standards," said Chris Ratcliffe, director of global services and solutions marketing at Dell.

Among the new products are the PowerEdge M805 and M905 blade servers complemented by M8024 10Gbit Ethernet and M5024 Fibre Channel switches, and the EqualLogic PS5500E iSSCI storage appliance.

Available immediately, the PowerEdge blade servers are focused on memory and I/O scalability.

The M805 has the "scalability of a four-socket blade in a two-socket design" , according to Sally Stevens, director of server platform marketing at Dell, while the four-socket M905 has "best in class power efficiency".

Both are based on AMD Opteron processors and can be fitted with up to 128GB or 192GB memory respectively.

Stevens said that Dell will also ship an updated version of its PowerEdge R900 rack-mount server with Intel's Dunnington six-core Xeon chip as soon as this becomes available.

Dell said that its servers are certified for Microsoft's Hyper-V platform and now have expanded support for VMWare and Citrix XenServer.

Providing connectivity for the blade servers, the M8024 is the first 10Gbit Ethernet switch with eight external ports, according to Dell, while the Brocade M5024 offers eight external FC8 Fibre Channel ports. Both ship next month.

On the storage side, Dell said it is working to integrate its EqualLogic storage seamlessly with virtual infrastructure.

A new VMware Edition of its Auto-Snapshot Manager is designed to make automatic snapshots, with easy recovery if needed.

"The idea is you set it up once and walk away. If needed, an admin can just point-and-click to recover, right down to an individual virtual machine," said John Joseph, vice president of Dell's EqualLogic division.

Joseph also unveiled the new EqualLogic PS5500E storage device, which supports 24TB or 48TB Sata hard drives up to a total of 576TB of storage.

The PS series also now features out-of-the-box integration with Citrix XenServer, supporting thin provisioning of volumes.

Completing the picture are Dell's services, designed to help customers get up and running with minimal fuss, according to the firm.

"Our consulting services are different. We don't have a large number of consultants, and it's all about simplifying, helping our customers get rapid time to value," said Tim Webb, director of global infrastructure consulting services at Dell.

Webb added that Dell has now has a complete service portfolio, with full support for Microsoft's newly announced System Center Virtual Machine Manager. "We have support from the data centre to the desktop," he said.