Dell delivering quite a punch with its virtualization expansion

Dell isn’t playing games with the virtualization trend that is taking place. The company seems to be embracing the technology in a big way. Dell has hit the ground running with its storage solution that it acquired from EqualLogic back in January, but the company has also gone virtualization crazy with quite a few new offerings and OEM agreements that seem to be putting the company on the right virtualization path.

“The question isn’t will businesses virtualize, but when, and who can provide the platforms and services to make the rollout a success,” said Rick Becker, vice president of software and solutions at Dell Product Group. “While our competitors thrive on complexity to push proprietary hardware, management, and services lock-ins, Dell’s virtualization strategy is grounded in choice and defined by industry standards. By offering our customers the latest, industry-proven technologies, services, and reference architectures, we are helping simplify their IT operations without limiting their options for future growth.”

The company has announced new blade offerings that were designed with virtualization in mind. The PowerEdge M805 and M905 blades are full-height, two-socket and four-socket blades, respectively, running AMD Dual Core or Quad Core Opteron processors. The M805 has 16 DIMMs and supports up to 128GB of memory while the M905 has 24 DIMMs and supports 192GB of memory. Dell said that both systems are available with a choice of Citrix XenServer, VMware, or Microsoft’s Hyper-V.

In addition to the new blade servers, Dell also announced full, high-speed 10Gb Ethernet and 8Gb Fibre Channel switches and mezzanine cards to address one of the growing problems with virtualization environments — the I/O bottleneck caused by running so many virtual machines on a single system. These new items are designed to provide customers with the increased bandwidth and performance they need in a virtual environment.

Dell has added new services to its lineup that are designed to simplify the design, deployment, security, and management of virtualized environments. They include Infrastructure Consulting Services for Microsoft Hyper-V deployments, a comprehensive assessment, design, and implementation service to accelerate deployment of Microsoft virtualization technologies; Site Recovery Manager (SRM) for VMware environments, automating VMware disaster recovery with implementation, on-site installation, and configuration of Site Recovery Manager; and Lifecycle Management for VMware environments, offering design and implementation planning, with proof-of-concept for installation and configuration of the lifecycle manager in customers’ VMware environments.

The company has also announced two new important OEM agreements to help with their big push into virtualization.

The first is with Vizioncore. Dell has been a Vizioncore channel partner for more than 2 years, and this strategic announcement furthers the go-to-market relationship between the two companies, enhancing the options available to customers who want to both optimize and safeguard their virtualized environments.

With this new OEM agreement, Dell is able to expand its overall virtualization portfolio. Chris Akerberg, President and Chief Operating Officer of Vizioncore, said, “Dell will be able to provide our vRanger Pro, vReplicator, vFoglight [formerly vCharter Pro] and vConverter products directly to their customers.”

Dell also announced an OEM solution with PlateSpin, a Novell company that specialized in disaster recovery software. The agreement includes PlateSpin PowerConvert software, which enables enterprises to optimize their datacenter by streaming server workloads over the network between physical servers, virtual hosts, and image archives. Dell is also utilizing PlateSpin PowerRecon for the planning and assessment of customer virtualization projects as part of its Virtual Readiness Assessment (VRA). In addition, Dell will also sell and support PlateSpin’s broader solutions which provide customers with a unified suite to help them adopt, manage, and extend their use of server virtualization in the datacenter.

Dell will have a large presence at VMware’s annual virtualization conference, VMworld, which kicks off to the general public on Tuesday.