Dell's game plan reaches for the clouds

Manufacturer Dell is teaming up with other companies to provide software, storage and management services. Photo / Ted Baghurst

Dell doesn't purport to be bleeding edge. When the computer manufacturer makes something, you know it's because a large enough market wants it.

With that in mind, I took the invitation to hear about Dell's latest servers as an opportunity to see where the industry was moving.

The company's latest tagline for this is "virtual era", which is as woolly as "cloud", but it's all part of the same dynamic of breaking an organisation's physical attachment to its computing resources.

If people are really moving to clouds, either by buying their software as a service from an outside provider or by converting their existing internal systems into a private cloud architecture, there is equipment they need to buy and a high-volume commodity manufacturer like Dell is the sort of operator who will sell it to them.

It's not just the hardware of course. The software and services that come with the silicon is every bit as important, and Dell has a good record of providing simplified management tools with its kit.

Dell's US$3.9 billion ($5.5 billion) purchase at the end of last year of Perot Systems, the services company founded by one-time US presidential aspirant Ross Perot, shows how the company is widening its scope to take on the other two remaining giants in the industry, IBM and Hewlett Packard.

What's interesting is where the new Power Edge C-Series servers come from.

The Dell success story was about the manufacturing and logistics systems that helped it pump out PCs marginally cheaper than its rivals.

That included being first off the block in harnessing the internet as a sales channel.

For big customers, such as the cloud providers wanting tens of thousands of units for their server farms, Dell will do some customisation.

Some of these customisations - such as a high-memory server with 18 DIMMs, giving it a total of 144 gigabytes of memory - are now being made available to smaller customers. It's not for everyone, but if you're building a data centre to run a web 2.0 application, a gaming site or other large website, it may be just the ticket.

There's also servers with the new Intel Xeon 5600 Westmere processors, which supposedly offer overall system performance increases of up to 69 per cent and energy efficiency improvements of up to 47 per cent. All in all, the normal technology refresh cycle.

It's all starting to come together though, as this sort of commodity, standards-based hardware and management software displaces some of the specialist systems of old.

Dell's local team say they are starting to see their systems used to replace legacy mainframe systems, doing the same job at a fraction of the cost.

The other part of the virtual era announcements was team ups with utility software provider Symantec and storage giant EMC around data management and storage.

The problem all organisations face is they just keep generating more data, and all this data needs to be stored somewhere, even though most of it will never be looked at again.

An estimated 95 per cent of the data is unstructured, which means documents, sound and video files, pictures and the like. Every time someone attaches something to an email and forwards it to a colleague, that's more data being replicated.

A single slide can be used in multiple presentations, all chewing up storage.

Over the past two years, analysts Forrester Research estimate storage has jumped from 10 to 17 per cent as a percentage of the IT hardware budget.

Dell is attacking this replication or duplication with the PowerVault backup and recovery appliance.

It sits on a network and uses Symantec software for backup, recovery and deduplication, removing multiple copies of data.

It's also selling Dell versions of EMC's Data Domain servers, which include back up and deduplication tools.

Dell says the combination of hardware and software means up to 97 per cent less storage space is needed for backups.

Analyst Kevin McIsaac from Australian-based Intelligent Business Research Services says before investing capital in deduplication technology, IT organisations need to understand where it should be used and why.

He says while a deduplication solution will suit some organisations, others can benefit by reviewing their management processes to understand why duplication occurs, and perhaps change those processes.

For example, documents could be stored in a content management system and linked to in emails rather than being attached.