While you won’t hear us say “blade everything,” you will hear us talk about the virtues of blades and where they make sense for customers. Tom Cloyd and Chad Fenner, who both focus on blade technologies for Dell, chat in this vlog about Dell’s new PowerEdge M805 and PowerEdge M905 server blades.

At Dell, we talk a lot about how to simplify IT. But the most powerful voices come from customers. Merlin Glynn, CTO of MedNetwoRx in Dallas, Texas, was kind enough to write this email and allow us to publish it here. Thank you for writing Merlin.

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I am the CTO of a small to medium-sized ASP where our annual budgets are very tight.  Perhaps in our IT market place more than any other, we attempt to stretch our buying potential to its utmost.  We have recently undertaken a 12 month DataCenter refresh project where we have upgraded/implemented over 160 physical and virtual servers along with associated DELL-EMC storage, OpenManage IT systems management, and other DataCenter Infrastructure objects.  I wanted to take this time to commend the Dell Enterprise Technology Center for the documentation, case studies, and technical sales material they produce.  In particular Scott Hanson’s many projects related to PowerEdge Servers and VMware have been of extreme benefit to us in choosing DELL as our preferred hardware vendor.  Documents such as Competitive Power Savings with VMware Consolidation on the Dell PowerEdge 2950 gave us template data to plan power consumption and capacity analysis of the large virtualization component of our data center refresh.  In the past 12 months we have consolidated 100+ various x86 platform servers onto 26 Dell Poweredge 2950s.  Recent studies with VMware DRS and VMotion capabilities on Dell servers, provided by Mr. Hanson and the Dell Enterprise Technology Center, have also greatly assisted us in planning for our current VMware Disaster Recovery implementation.  The output of this group is the main reason we continue to deploy DELL servers in our environment today.  We know we can trust the real world data provided in these projects to make decisions that will maximize our deployment dollar.

Mednetworx focuses on providing (EHR) Electronic Health Records and (PM) Practice Management software to our customer base via a secure ASP application presentation scenario.  In addition to our DataCenter Refresh project, our company has also gone from acquisition to production with an implementation of an Allscripts TouchWorks PM and EHR solution for the New Mexico Department of Health.  New Mexico has 33 counties and the state's total area is 121,665 square miles.  At a population density of 15 per square mile, New Mexico is the sixth most sparsely inhabited U.S. State.  THIS IMPLEMENTATION EFFORT SPANNED 55 LOCATIONS IN ONLY 12 MONTHS, and was implemented on DELL Poweredge 2950 servers, DELL-EMC CX storage along with Cisco, Citrix, and VMware products.  We could not have performed this implementation without the rapid purchase cycle of DELL distribution and ‘up-front’ knowledge of the server capabilities in our planned environment, which we gleaned from material produced by the Dell Enterprise Technology Center.  So from one of your ‘smaller’ customers, I say thanks for the job these guys and DELL as a whole have done for our SMB business model.

Last week I met with AMD's Pat Patla and several of his closest analyst buddies at a dinner AMD was hosting.  Pat heads up AMD's server and workstation business division and we thought it would be fun to get together and talk about some of our efforts.  We’ve been busy working on an upcoming server platform that we have already been talking a bit about - the PowerEdge M805 and M905 Blade Servers - and wanted to give you some more information, in the video below.

Hope you like what you see and we look forward to hearing from you.

Starting today, we will be OEMing Solaris for customers looking for this option on Dell PowerEdge servers. We've worked closely with Sun to certify a select set of Dell PowerEdge servers for Solaris. The idea here is to give customers one place to purchase an entire solution - hardware, software and services with ongoing support.  This should help reduce complexity and risk and lower operational costs.

Solaris 10 5/08 will be sold as a drop in the box. Additionally, Dell ProSupport will provide technical assistance for Solaris on Dell solutions, so customers only need to make one phone call to get answers to Solaris questions. To see a list of all Dell PowerEdge servers that are certified, visit dell.com/OSsupport or Sun’s HCL at www.sun.com/solaris/dell.

To learn more about Solaris on Dell platforms, visit dell.com/solaris.

- (editor's note - this post also comes from Greg White in storage marketing. Thanks again Greg)

Data tiering – classifying and segregating data on different types of disk drives – has been around for awhile, but has been somewhat limited by drive choices. Support for additional drive types on new disk arrays, like the Dell/EMC CX4 series, could make this more relevant for a much broader audience.

Initially, you basically had two choices - Fibre Channel (FC) or SATA. Over the last year or two, SAS drives have become alternatives for FC drives in some storage systems, as SAS drives offer 15K and 10K RPM options at typically lower cost due to higher industry volumes.

Today, new drive options, like Solid State (Flash) and Low Power SATA drives, are increasing the range and spread of potential data tiers. For example, flash drives can offer up to 30 times the performance of traditional 15K FC drives in some applications. Today, these drives come at a premium to FC drives; however, over time as prices decline, more and more users may use these drives for their most performance hungry applications.

Low power SATA is at the other end of the spectrum. These drives can consume almost a third less power than traditional SATA drives, making them ideal for storing data for long term retention where performance is not critical.

This raises a few questions for discussion:

1. Do these new options - and the increasing spread between choices - make data tiering more attractive or simply muddy the waters?

2. What are the implications for managing your data, storage systems, applications, as well as other considerations, like managing your spares for example?

3. How do you classify data and implement tiering on these new drive options?

Today’s storage systems that can support flash, FC, SAS, SATA and low power SATA drives as well as virtual provisioning are the future of storage. While tools that ease the process of tiering are increasing in number and maturing, there are opportunities to leverage these new drive options to start increasing storage efficiency and resource management through tiering efforts.

- (editor note - this post comes to us from Greg White in storage marketing. Thanks Greg)

Many organizations have been looking to desktops, notebooks and servers for power and cooling savings and the associated environmental benefits of green IT solutions. What about storage?

Up to this point, storage has lagged far behind because the lowest hanging fruit has been in other areas. Server virtualization and system management have been able to provide large savings in power and cooling for organizations of all sizes.

Now, storage is beginning to take center stage in this debate. Green storage opportunities fall into three key areas: components, platforms and methodology.

New storage arrays are starting to take some of the learnings from the server guys and putting in more efficient power supplies, variable speed fans and more efficient disk drives.

In addition, the platforms are doing more to address efficiency, like utilizing virtual provisioning and de-dupe technologies to increase resource utilization and reduce the number of drives that need power – the biggest source of most storage arrays power consumption.

Lastly, organizations are looking more at how, where and for how long they store data. While tape may be cumbersome to recover from in a short period of time, it is still much more power efficient than storing data on hard drives, and where disk storage is desired, there are new options like low power SATA drives that can be deployed.

Are these new improvements in storage leading you to start factoring storage into your power and cooling planning? Is green storage a key consideration, something that is nice to have, or not even on your radar now?

In my previous post, I talked about Dell’s PowerEdge M-Series and its advantages over HP’s c3000 “Shorty” in terms of power and configuration. As a follow up, thought we could look at an affordability comparison between the two systems.

One of the funny things about HP’s Shorty, in my opinion, is its cost – and how much, or little, a customer gets for that cost. Our M-Series with six M600 Intel-based servers, including simple and easy to use iSCSI storage, is about $5,400 per server. HP’s Shorty, with six BL460c servers and storage, runs approximately $6,200 per server. (FWIW - the M-Series is redundant fabric capable, Shorty is not.)

The M-Series is also redundant power supply and redundant circuit capable, with many other enterprise-class, business-necessary functionality important regardless of org size – such as remote management via a single CAT5 connection for accessing all the blades in an enclosure, instead of multiple dongles and external switches.

For many 16-blade configurations, the M-Series can run on one 30amp 208v single phase circuit (see the config in Part I), just like your window air conditioning unit and less than your 40amp electric clothes dryer. Since you will only be using 6 servers (in server/storage example above), you’ll save money on your purchase price – more than the electrician will probably charge you to run the 208 circuit. Not having to worry about blowing your circuit and having the ability to get redundant connectivity and redundant power are value adds that are native to the M-Series chassis.

Go to our easy-to-use Dell Datacenter Capacity Planner and configure your Dell Servers (any of them, not just blades) on a single tool. This has easily configurable hardware with usage models and directional guidance on power consumption. (As an FYI: You don’t have to register, give us your email address and opt out of “newsletters” to use it, which is what you have to do with similar tools from some competitors.)

With Dell’s M-Series, you just plug in more servers as your business grows. Or, you can buy another chassis from HP and spend more money you didn’t need to spend, if that is your desire. HP call’s their expansion scheme a “seamless upgrade”, but I wasn’t able to find any the specifics listed on their site. I’d rather have Dell’s M1000e chassis for a lower initial investment price with enterprise class feature/functions built in, and the ability to just plug in another blade server when I need it. No muss, no fuss.

Most of our content here at Inside IT is focused on the heavy equipment stuff - servers, storage etc....But today, I would like to address all of us carrying business notebooks out there.

Check out this post from our Chief Blogger Lionel Menchaca about the new Dell Latitude business notebooks and Precision mobile workstations.

Some highlights include up to 19 hours of battery life, "wow" design, backlit keyboards, color choices, enhanced security and durability features, and numerous connectivity options.

This will make you fundamentally reconsider what it means to have a "corporate" machine.

We've also created a new community site named Digital Nomads for people to share and connect about how "work" is changing in the Connected Era.

We recently announced FlexAddress on our PowerEdge M Series blade servers and have really tried to simplify our explanation of what it is, what it does and how it benefits you. Just as important, we have pointed out how our approach is very different from our competitors. Our goal here is to drive value for your IT department, and make this technology easy to understand and implement. Chad Fenner from our server group recently blogged about FlexAddress and the folks running the Dell Tech Center Wiki recently hosted a blades management Web chat on the topic.

In our announcement, we also shared some details about forthcoming new blade servers. Quite a few of you have been asking for clarification and more information.

So I asked Glenn and Chad to do a short video to talk about Flex Address and share what we can on our new blades. Check it out here.

Hopefully this helps explain some of the value FlexAddress provides and gives you a feel for what to expect with the new blades when they launch. These servers are awesome, and way more exciting than us talking about them. Nonetheless, we'd love to hear your opinion about blade technology and how to make FlexAddress technology easier to understand.

Stay tuned to the Inside IT blog for more details.

There is an ongoing debate about the merits and future of both iSCSI and Fibre Channel. The growth is in iSCSI, but there is a massive installed base of FC. We believe in unifying your fabric on Ethernet and moving to 10Gbit iSCSI over time as the most cost-effective and least complicated method for storage.

But what to do now? Many organizations have both FC and iSCSI and aren’t ready to commit to one or to throw away their current investments. Most manufacturers force you to choose one or the other, and then live with that decision for years.

Today we’re announcing the new Dell/EMC CX4 series arrays which can alleviate the burden of this decision and remove the uncertainty of the future thanks to their innovative modular I/O technology. It’s called UltraFlex – stay tuned to blog as we will dive deeper into this in upcoming posts.

With UltraFlex, you get two benefits:

· First, since all of these arrays come standard with both 1Gbit iSCSI and 4Gbit FC connectivity, you can consolidate storage on iSCSI for your stranded servers that don’t required FC performance or merit FC connectivity expense with your existing FC servers and infrastructure.

· Second, you are protected in the future thanks to open slots where you can seamlessly add more ports. This can be current technologies or it can be future ones like 10Gbit iSCSI and 8Gbit FC.

With Dell/EMC CX4 you get a storage device that is flexible and future-ready - giving you the choice to adapt your storage to your changing needs without having to start over or commit today.

iSCSI and Fibre Channel UltraFlex I/O modules on CX4-120

Front view of the CX4-960 including, from top to bottom, 3U DAE (disk array enclosure), 4U SPE (Storage Processor Enclosure) and 2U SPS (Standby Power Supply)