data centers

Dell today announced it is increasing its investments in new technology solutions and services.

In its current fiscal year, Dell will invest $1 billion to deliver solutions, services and cloud-based delivery options to help customers capture the benefits from new compute and information delivery advancements.

Over the next 24 months, Dell will build multiple data centers around the world to provide its customers access to public and private cloud technologies and its IT outsourcing capabilities. These new data centers will allow customers to take advantage of Infrastructure-, Platform- and Virtual Desktop-as-a-Service offerings as well as IT outsourcing.

Dell will open 12 Global Solution Centers this year and is planning 10 more over the next 18 months, to better bring open, capable and affordable solutions to organizations around the world. This global network of solution centers will provide a backdrop for customers to learn about Dell’s industry-focused solutions and domain expertise.

Announced today, Dell vStart accelerates and simplifies virtualization adoption by providing an easy way to purchase a complete virtual infrastructure solution delivered ready to run physical and virtual workloads. With vStart, an entire functioning virtual infrastructure solution is delivered ready to run up to 100 or 200 virtual machines from a single management environment – including Intel Xeon-based Dell PowerEdge servers, Dell EqualLogic storage, Dell PowerConnect switches, deployment services, hypervisors, and essential virtualization management extensions.

Dell vStart currently supports VMWare and support for other hypervisors is planned in the coming quarters.

Also today, Dell and Microsoft announced a three-year strategic initiative to help customers quickly deploy and manage virtualization and private cloud technologies. Management solutions will be based on Dell’s Virtual Integrated System, Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager and Microsoft System Center and will deliver improved integration across the physical, virtual and application layers. Virtualization solutions will be based on Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V.

Future jointly-engineered solutions based on Dell’s hardware and virtualization management technologies and Microsoft’s hypervisor and systems management technologies will simplify virtualization management, reduce costs and remove barriers to cloud adoption.

At last week’s GigaOM VIP reception, just before their Structure 08 conference, we bumped into Arne Josefsberg, General Manager Online Infrastructure at Microsoft. He happened to be passing by in San Francisco and kindly agreed to get on record with comments on Hyper-V adoption at Microsoft. As he answered our late night questions, the party was just breaking up (hence the disturbing background sounds).

Update: also check out this article on GigaOM, since Om Malik caught up with Microsoft’s corporate VP of global foundation services, Debra Chrapaty, for a video chat as well.

Although Arne declined to put exact numbers to the amount of servers at Microsoft, he did confirm he is responsible for dozens of datacenters around the world to support the software giant’s online services. To give you an idea, Data Center Knowledge noted from a Microsoft executive that the company is adding no less than 10 000 servers per month.

Here is a datacenter lesson from Arne:

“As Microsoft obviously deploys a huge amount of processor, compute and storage capacity, [the need for] efficiency and utilization become super important to us. We work very closely with the Windows Operating system division. Hyper-V is actually becoming one of our key-technologies to drive better utilization of the hardware. We have Hyper-V in multiple datacenters in the Live-network, in production environments taking live traffic. It’s going quite quite well. So we are very jazzed about Hyper-V and virtualization as a technology to scale out our infrastructure.”

Arne’s team has been working closely with the Hyper-V development team for over a year and did not limit this collaboration to the hypervisor, but also the management tools and on how to manage hypervisors at very large scale.

When asked about cloud computing, Microsoft refers to its ‘Software plus Services’ strategy which combines software on the desktop (still the major revenue driver for Microsoft) with centralized datacenter-based services. Microsoft seems high on its hybrid flavor of cloud computing and hopes to lead the way in this nascent industry as well.