Dell

VMware Site Recovery Manager 1.0 Released

June 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VMware has announced its new tool for disaster recovery management and automation of a virtual infrastructure, VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 1.0 (build 97878).

VMware SRM 1.0 is part of VMware’s suite of management and automation products for the datacenter, leverages virtualization to simplify business continuity planning and testing, and reduces the risk and complexity associated with executing disaster recovery.

“Effective disaster recovery has been a significant challenge for many organizations,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president of products and solutions at VMware. “With the delivery of VMware Site Recovery Manager, VMware removes hurdles associated with disaster recovery planning and implementation. Through our innovative disaster recovery testing, management, and automation capabilities, we bring predictability back into the hands of IT and help eliminate risks associated with human error.”

Site Recovery Manager works seamlessly with VMware Infrastructure, VMware VirtualCenter, and replication software from storage partners to provide integrated disaster recovery management and automation. It provides:

Integrated management of disaster recovery plans. Create, update and document recovery plans directly from VMware VirtualCenter.
Non-disruptive testing of disaster recovery plans. Execute automated tests of recovery plans in an isolated testing environment using the recovery plan that would be used in an actual failover. Hardware configuration dependencies are eliminated and testing can occur without impacting production systems.
Automated failover and recovery. Automate execution of the recovery process, eliminating many of the slow and unreliable manual processes common in traditional disaster recovery.

VMware’s parent company, EMC, is one of the first vendors to officially announce support for Site Recovery Manager. Other vendors showing support for the product include 3Par, Dell, FalconStor Software, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM, LeftHand Networks, and NetApp.

Pricing for Site Recovery Manager is based on the number of processors in the servers. SRM can be purchased as a standalone product or purchased as part of VMware’s Management and Automation Bundle which includes two-processor versions of VMware Site Recovery Manager, VMware Lifecycle Manager, and VMware Lab Manager or VMware Stage Manager. There’s also a trial version available for download.

Gartner: Server Market Still Growing, Despite Virtualization

May 23, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Just recently, Gartner published a report showing that the server market did great during all of 2007, including the fourth quarter. Server shipments rose 11 % during the fourth quarter, while revenue rose almost 3 %.

The analyst firm has now proclaimed server sales and shipments also showed strong growth in the first quarter of this year compared to last year despite continued growth of the use of server virtualization technology. Jeffrey Hewitt, VP Research at Gartner said that certain factors are “masking” the impact of server virtualization.

“A lot of the growth in physical server sales is coming from an explosion in the use of certain applications such as Web servers, which often do not lend themselves to being virtualized. Also, server virtualization is still much more accepted in mature markets such as the US, Europe, and Australia, and less adopted in fast-growing markets such as China. Additionally, customers are not running server virtualization on old hardware. Customers are buying larger servers to host virtualization. This market is so hungry for more and more horsepower. Virtualization makes it easier to host more and faster applications.”

Gartner on Thursday said that a total of 2.3 million servers were sold in the first quarter, up about 7.6 percent over the 2.1 million shipped during the same quarter last year. Revenue growth was not as strong, however. Vendors sold $13.6 billion worth of servers during the quarter, up only 4.3 percent compared to the $13.0 billion in server sales last year, Gartner said.

HP was the world’s top server vendor during the first quarter of 2008, accounting for 30.1 percent of the total worldwide shipments. Fast growth in server shipments by Dell, which boasts a 22.7 percent market share, puts that company within striking range of the top position. Dell’s shipments grew 15.8 percent over last year compared to HP’s growth of 7.8 percent.

Worldwide RISC-based and Itanium- based server shipments slipped 8.4 percent compared to last year, with all top five vendors seeing a drop in sales. However, revenue for this class of servers grew 3.7 percent over last year, with all top five vendors seeing revenue growth except for Sun, which saw revenue drop as its Solaris Unix-based focus continues to shift more towards x86-based servers, Hewitt said.

Shipments of servers with the Linux OS grew the fastest year-over-year, up 13.9 percent compared to the 6.8 percent growth of shipments of servers with Windows, Hewitt said. However, the overall base of Linux-based servers is still only half that of Windows-based servers, so in terms of absolute numbers, Windows- based server shipments grew faster.

[Source: ChannelWeb]

Dell Gets Down & Busy With Virtualization

May 7, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

As expected, Dell today announced its broadest lineup of dedicated virtualization solutions ever. More than a dozen new servers, tools, and services aim to simplify the deployment and management of virtualization in enterprises of any size.

“Virtualization is quickly moving beyond hypervisors and hardware consolidation,” said Rick Becker, vice president of software and solutions, Dell Product Group. “Enterprises are looking for a broad array of servers, storage and services designed specifically for virtualized environments. Having been a leader in the first wave of virtualization, today we are signaling our intent to lead the second.”

Dell comes out with updated on-line tools, new e-commerce capability and expanded factory integration. With the updated Virtualization Advisor tool, customers have more options for building validated configurations online for virtualization deployments before purchase.

Through Dell.com/VMwareNow, customers can now upgrade PowerEdge servers purchased with VMware ESXi 3.5 to full VMware Infrastructure 3 enterprise licensing in a single click. Dell will also offer in coming weeks factory integrated VMware ESXi 3.5 or Citrix XenServer Dell Express Edition across a broad range of PowerEdge servers, including the PowerEdge 2950, R900, 1950, 2900, M600 blade and M605 blade.

The PowerEdge R805 offers 2X the memory and I/O capacity of Dell’s previous generation 2 socket servers. With a choice of VMware ESXi 3.5 or Citrix XenServer Dell Express Edition integrated hypervisors, the PowerEdge R805 and R905 servers can deliver the optimal platform for virtualized environments.

Dell EqualLogic storage arrays offer new advanced SAN-aware integration with VMware Site Recovery Manager for data protection and disaster recovery for virtualized environments at no additional cost in management tools.

Dell and Egenera are making virtualization and data center automation a reality beyond the blade chassis. The Dell PAN system is built on PowerEdge 1950 and 2950 servers and Dell/EMC storage, with Citrix XenServer and factory integrated as a complete, turn-key solution that consolidates and virtualizes server compute-resources into an entire Processor Area Network to be managed like hard drives in a SAN. The Dell PAN system can deliver rapid provisioning and re-deployment “in minutes”.

Dell today announced the expansion of its virtualization services to include:

Virtualization Simplification Workshop – for customers looking to determine which options are the most suitable for their specific business needs today, their technical environment and to meet future growth.
New Virtualization Operational Assessment and Process Automation accelerates selection of the right virtualization technology for their needs and define processes and tools to automate the management of virtualized environments.
New Virtualization Healthcheck – reviews existing virtualized production environments to identify technology, process and people issues impeding virtualization scale out and provides an actionable, results oriented plan.
Expanded Virtualization Assessment – taking into account multi-vendor virtualization considerations, advanced storage options, as well as green IT data center energy efficiency improvements.
Dell PAN Accelerator Service – integrating a full Processing Area Network within the customer environment to help ensure production readiness.
Expanded Design and Implementation Services – which features the latest Virtualization technologies, in addition to best-of-breed disaster recovery tools and techniques.
ProSupport Remote Advisory Services – fast access to technical experts for consulting on virtualization implementations.

These offerings are available today from Dell Global Infrastructure Consulting Services.

Dell Now Offers Five Server Platforms Based On Quad-Core AMD Opteron

April 16, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

AMD today announced that Dell is now offering five server platforms based on Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors. This news follows last week’s announcement that Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors are generally available, and brings the number of available global OEM platforms based on the new processors to 13. Additionally, AMD is announcing today that VMware has completed qualification of Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors for use in VMware ESX and ESXi hypervisor deployments, enabling customers to leverage the latest in VMware virtualization on these server systems.

Dell servers now supporting Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors include the PowerEdge SC1435, 2970, M605 blade server and 6950 platforms, as well as the new PowerEdge T605 tower server. The T605, aimed at SMEs or remote locations, offers features such as hot-plug hard drives, remote management and redundant power supplies, resulting in high-availability systems that help prevent data access loss and increase uptime.

“Dell is delivering on its vision to simplify IT by providing customers with a seamless and simple upgrade path to Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors on PowerEdge servers,” said Brad Anderson, senior vice president, Dell Business Product Group. “The combination of AMD’s most advanced processors running on Dell PowerEdge servers provides an optimal balance of performance and energy efficiency across a variety of customer solutions, from general purpose and remote office to high-performance compute clusters and virtualized data center environments.”

[Source: Hardocp]

Egenera Inks OEM Deal With Dell

March 25, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Dell has agreed to resell and ship Egenera‘s Processing Area Network (PAN) Manager I/O virtualization software on its PowerEdge servers by June of this year. Egenera claims PAN is the epitome of what IDC calls “Virtualization 2.0,” the next step beyond simple VMware-style single server virtualization replete with scalability, faster provisioning, high availability, disaster recovery and resource balancing. Pricing for the software has yet to be released.

Egenera’s PAN Manager supports Citrix Systems Inc.’s Citrix XenServer and VMware Inc.’s virtual machines and the company plans to support Microsoft’s virtualization technology, Hyper-V, when it becomes available later this year, CTO Peter Manca said.

The OEM deal with Dell is obviously not exclusive, meaning PAN could still wind up on IBM and HP gear, although that path seems much harder to follow than sticking with Dell. The computer giant intends to sell the widgetry on PowerEdge servers initially through its Advanced Solutions unit along with infrastructure consulting services.

From the press release:

“Dell is listening to customers and providing solutions that make the virtual data center easier to deploy and manage, regardless of platform,” said Rick Becker, vice president, Dell Software & Solutions. “Dell and Egenera will help customers focus on company growth by delivering excellence in virtualized infrastructure from server performance, storage interoperability to dynamic data center management.”

“The Dell-Egenera relationship was driven by customer need for simple, agile and cost-effective solutions that virtualize and unify data center assets beyond a single server,” said Mike Thompson, president and CEO, Egenera. “We’re driving to provide customers with a powerful, integrated way to manage server, network and storage assets, with lower operational costs, increased resource utilization and uptime.”

[Source: SearchServerVirtualization]

Dell Reportedly Plans To Give Away VMware ESX Server 3i For Free, World Keeps Turning

March 15, 2008 by Robin Wauters 4 Comments

According to The Inquirer, it appears Dell is considering to stop charging VMware ESX Server 3i licensing fees on its PowerEdge servers to its customers. This was reportedly said by VMWare’s Senior Product Marketing Manager Martin Niemer and comes two weeks after the virtualization vendor announced it would start embedding the 32 MB hypervisor across Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP and IBM servers.

This doesn’t come as a big surprise, as VMware had added to the previous announcement that hardware vendors would be able to choose which premium they would charge to end customers, if any. Expect the other hardware vendors to follow suit and drop the prices for including the hypervisors significantly (or even zero) if Dell comes through, especially with the sharp-priced Microsoft hypervisor Hyper-V on its way.

But don’t expect this to have a serious impact on the whole VMware reseller channel’s bottom line, as some blogs are proclaiming already. The real money is in the enterprise offering and upgrades anyway, and the smaller distributors and resellers have other advantages when it comes to SMB offerings besides pricing.