April 2008 - Posts

• A new appliance-perfect server for OEMs

  Wed. Apr. 30, 2008
  by Rick Froelich, VP, OEM Industry Solutions Group

  This week we launched the OEM CR100 server, a short 1u form factor system built on PowerEdge technology, designed to help appliance vendors simplify IT for their customers. We’re really excited to offer this server exclusively to appliance OEM customers, who look to us for tier-1 stability, quality and global support for their appliance solutions.

  The CR100 is a rapidly deployable server that we can customize to the needs of our OEM customers. It comes in five different configurations that can be preloaded with their software and can incorporate customer-specific branding and packaging. With a long two-year lifecycle, the CR100 is backed by our End-to-End Appliance Program which includes the vital lifecycle management services, value-added logistics, Dell warranty and support services that our existing appliance customers have come to expect from Dell.

  I am confident that CR100 will help appliance vendors of all sizes —Secure Computing, McAfee and Connectbeam, to name a few— continue to grow their business with the confidence of knowing that their solutions are Dell-powered.

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• Online demos of stuff you need

  Wed. Apr. 30, 2008
  by Marc Farley, Inside IT Lead Blogger

  Posted earlier today on Storage @ Work

  There's a few excellent live online events in the next couple days you might want to check out.

  April 30 (Today) 12:30 PM Eastern: De-dupe for Dell EqualLogic iSCSI arrays - featuring Exagrid's new iSCSI De-dupe gateway product.

  April 30 (Today) 1:00 PM Eastern: VMware's Site Recovery Manager and Dell EqualLogic storage. I know a lot of people are going to be interested in this one - integrating intelligence into the recovery side of VMware DR!

  May 1st 3:00 PM Eastern: Dell EqualLogic iSCSI SAN array live demonstration

  May 2nd 10:00 AM Central European Time: In German: Live Dell EqualLogic PS Series array product demonstration

  May 2nd 1:00 PM Eastern: VI3 (VMware Infrastructure 3) and Dell EqualLogic demonstration. Our online events calendar

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• Microsoft Management Summit is very hot and Dell is in the buzz

  Tue. Apr. 29, 2008
  by Ed Reynolds, Dir, Dell Systems Mgmt Mktg

  A Dell employee emailed from the Microsoft Management Summit this morning:

  I am in the opening keynote here at MMS. Being the featured hardware partner for SCCM is awesome. The room is PACKED and attendees are hearing Microsoft talk about how great Dell systems management is.

  Microsoft’s Bob Muglia, MS SVP, highlighted Dell’s preliminary bare metal deployment pack in his keynote. Hubba hubba and hey now.

  Many of our customers use Microsoft’s System Center and Dell’s OpenManage to manage their infrastructure. And who do you think offers the most comprehensive device management through Microsoft’s System Center Suite? (Dell does) And we’re not resting. This week we’re announcing the upcoming availability of the latest Dell Management Packs for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager that will give customers superior monitoring and control of Dell desktops, portables, workstations, rack and tower servers, blades, networked storage devices and even printers.

  Our new plug-ins and our roadmap to integrate Dell Services with Microsoft products means our mutual customers will continue to have industry leading tools to manage their IT infrastructures. All this talk about simplifying IT really means something.

  Thanks for the kind words this morning Bob!

  Technorati Tags: Microsoft,management summit,system center,openmanage,Dell,server management,infrastructure management
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• Is Sun giving up or changing the game?

  Tue. Apr. 29, 2008
  by Marc Farley, Inside IT Lead Blogger

  Sun, the perennial also ran in the storage business is making a very bold move.  If they succeed, it could change the storage industry forever.  If they don't, it will just be "same old Sun".EqualLogic already did something similar with its priceless (free) software business model.

  Sun's gambit, of course, is different. I imagine that Sun will attempt to support its revenue-less software.  That could work, or....

  A teaser quote-cap:

  Sun has this litigation going with Netapp right now and that does involve open sourcing software......All of a sudden that litigation is becoming a lot more interesting for the whole industry because what Sun is doing here could have an impact on everybody else in the industry and now everybody else has to pay a lot closer attention to it. 

  Format: flv Duration: 04:04

  Downloads WMV  MP4  OGG

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• Healthcare customer pays housecall to Dell

  Tue. Apr. 29, 2008
  by Jeff Johnson, Enterprise Strategist

  An excellent customer from the healthcare industry wrote about the day he spent at Dell HQ  touring our facilities.  Thanks for the review, John and thanks for coming all the way to Round Rock! 

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• the iSCSI downlow on crash consistent Exchange snaps

  Tue. Apr. 29, 2008
  by Marc Farley, Inside IT Lead Blogger

  I'm stoked.  Yesterday Dell EqualLogic announced Exchange integration with the Auto Snapshot Manager for PS series iSCSI SAN arrays. The Smart Copy for Exchange functionality joins the Smart Copy for SQL Server functionality that we already have in the product. 
  

  Smart Copy is crash-consistent, application-aware data protection. A quick explanation of how it works is in Darren Miller's discussion of VDS/VSS integration in this blog post from a couple weeks ago.  Exchange admins are going to like this for the flexibility and time savings it has. Smart copy for Exchange is a storage software power tool that will make backups, recoveries, remote replication, backup validation and volume cloning much easier.
  
  Of course, one of the best things about it is that it will be available to our customers as a free download as part of a new release of our Host Integration Toolkit (we call it the hit kit), to be released in May. If this isn't the best deal in storage software I don't know what is. Customers get incredible software without having to make an additional purchase and the technical support behind it is excellent.

  Also yesterday, Lucid8 announced a new Outlook snap-in that allows end users to restore deleted mailbox and item data that resides on PS Series snapshots - without having to bug admins for help.  How cool is that?  Years ago when I worked at Palindrome we developed end user restores of files from data stored in tape libraries. This is much more useful because email discovery is becoming such a common occurrence. Things just keep coming together.
  

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• yep, I could use one of those

  Tue. Apr. 29, 2008
  by Marc Farley, Inside IT Lead Blogger

  Ben Rockwood posted on a clever device - a docking port for SATA drives.
  

  I don't like prying apart my USB and firewire cases either to switch drives, so I wonder if there is a two-holer under consideration.  I almost always end up doing big dump/fills when I start using my external drives.
  

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• Some serious whackness on iSCSI

  Mon. Apr. 28, 2008
  by Marc Farley, Inside IT Lead Blogger

  The link:  http://digg.com/hardware/Mission_Critical_iSCSI_Storage_Networks

  Your job:  determine what is the most whacked comment

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• Storagezilla calls it: Amazon cloud storage is a bust

  Sun. Apr. 27, 2008
  by Marc Farley, Inside IT Lead Blogger

  Mark Twomey's StorageZilla blog is one of my favorites.  Insightful, witty and often inspired.

  In his latest entry, Zilla-man claims to have seen the soft white underbelly of Amazon's EC2 and S3 cloud storage business. 

  Of course this was pretty interesting to me as I'm a prehistoric skeptic of cloud storage, although most of my opinions on the matter have circled around the reliability end of things. 

  What I never did say, but wondered in the darkness was how the economics of it were going to work. There aren't all that many free lunches in this world and the hard knocks of storage don't appear to lend themselves to infinite sweetness and light. Storage is just a gnarly technology and that means there is real cost incurred somewhere.

  Zilla-man writes;
  

  one wonders for how much longer Amazon will continue to happily subsidize every user of their AWS offerings? Their capacity is as finite as everyone else's so eventually there will have to be another big infrastructure spend cycle where Amazon have to decide if they're going to go deeper into the hole or not.
  

  Zilla-man, in your honor, a link to the Kate Bush video "Cloudbusting"

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• How much can you turn off?

  Fri. Apr. 25, 2008
  by Marc Farley, Inside IT Lead Blogger
  Technorati Tags: ken brill,uptime institute,greenbiz,Blades,Dell,Energy conservation,Green benchmarks,Green technology,HP,Hardware,IBM,Open Source Systems (OSS),Power consumption,Power supplies,Sustainable IT

  GreenBiz radio has an interview with Ken Brill of the Uptime Institute.  Its a bit long, but all the text is there so you can speed read through it if you want.

  One of the more interesting things that Brill claims is that lots of energy can be conserved by turning off equipment that isn't being used.  Here's a quote from the interview transcript:

  KB: Well, the institute believes that IT could radically reduce its energy consumption, and it would save money in the process. And there are a number of things that people can do and we're gonna be talking about these at our upcoming symposium. But the first thing that people can do is to go through their data center and identify what is running that could just be turned off. Between 10 and 30 percent of the energy consumption in a typical data center is for servers and storage and other things that is no longer in use.  And it could just be turned -- I mean, as literally, as simple as turning the switch.

  Ken has some interesting things to say about blade servers too. Just like any other technology, there are important differences in blade server designs.

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