“Dell data centers provide the best cost of acquisition and the best cost of running”
What are the key technology trends impacting data centers currently?
As Indian organizations move through growth trajectories, it is putting significant pressure on their IT infrastructure, including data centers. The increased focus on data center efficiency, agility, reliability and cost optimization in India has led to a few interesting changes.
A virtualization-led consolidation strategy seems to be the common thread across most data centers in India, which would lead to moderate capacity growth. Indian data center managers are also becoming increasingly concerned about the kind of facilities that they should incorporate in their infrastructure such as power, cooling and space. Additionally they are concerned about implementing disaster recovery (DR). This is because DR solutions enable organization to optimize their costs and ensure business continuity.
In order to meet green IT directives organizations are also employing various strategies like server virtualization and data-deduplication in their datacenters. In addition to containing costs through increased IT efficiency, organizations are also implementing a variety of technology approaches–from virtualization and storage management to high availability tools to make better use of and maximize existing hardware resources.
Lastly, intelligent infrastructure management is another trend seen amongst organizations. This helps companies to shift their IT focus from maintaining disparate devices in data centers to directing a single landscape of servers (both physical and virtual) and storage. This also ensures better maintenance at lesser cost and with fewer complexities.
How would you rate Dell data center solutions for efficiency, scalability and flexibility?
Dell data center solutions have been designed to provide the utmost efficiency, connectivity, flexibility and scalability required for smooth functioning. Dell data centers are designed in such a way that they provide customers with the following benefits:
• Speed: The Dell datacenters can be designed, built, and up and running 75 percent faster than a traditional data center.
• Efficiency: Designed for hyper-efficiency, Dell datacenters provide important advantages for flexible growth and cost reduction. The team at Dell works hard to optimize your entire data center to reduce operational costs.
• Flexiblity: Where the competition force fits IT into a rigid shipping container, we collaborate with customers to custom build their data centers.
Does Dell deliver on the price-to-performance equation for SMBs and large enterprises?
Yes we do. In fact our recently launched Power Edge Vrtx is a shared infrastructure platform offering extensive performance and capacity with office-level acoustics in a single, compact tower chassis. It is an ideal solution for small and midsize businesses as well as remote and branch offices of large enterprises. Employing the latest PowerEdge technology and high-availability features, VRTX can help Small and Medium Businesses gain fast application response times, run multiple applications that need performance or low latency, power through peak processing periods and scale for future business growth.
Can you give some real examples where Dell data centers have been optimized to increase business productivity?
We have several customer case studies that quantify Dell’s contributions. UST Global partnered with Dell to design a virtual data center solution powered by Dell Compellent™ storage arrays and Dell PowerEdge™ blade servers to achieve significant savings and efficiencies, including achieving ROI 50 percent faster than anticipated. With this the company was able to get the following benefits: • ROI on future proofed solution achieved 50 percent faster than planned
• Proactive support levels delivered by Dell Compellent Copilot become organization-wide benchmark
• Capacity scaled three-fold on reduced data center footprint
• Business continuity assured with 60-minute system recovery
• Improved client responsiveness through dramatic reduction in provisioning from weeks to hours
Similarly JM Financial consolidated their infrastructure on Dell™PowerEdge™servers with VMware® virtualization software and a Dell EqualLogic storage solution. With this they were able to derive the following benefits:
• Reduce data center footprint by 45 percent through server consolidation of 88 percent
• High availability meets customer
• demands for real-time trading information
• Highly scalable solution improves business responsiveness
• Reduces maintenance resources by 15 percent and improves strategic focus
• Decreases energy consumption by 25 percent and helps control long-term costs
Dell has recently updated its network portfolio to support the move to virtualized and cloud data centers. How has the customers’ response been to this?
As every innovation we undertake in Dell is keeping in mind the customer’s needs, our developments and expansions are very well supported by our customers. In fact most of our innovations are customer-feedback driven. For example Asian Paints had successfully consolidated its operations and moved to a centralized ERP solution, but higher data volumes and business expansion led to a greater need for a scalable, high throughput network infrastructure. We were able to solve Asian Paints business need by helping them solidify their network core and added scalable and reliable switching capacity by deploying the Dell Force10 C150 modular chassis and subsequently upgrading to the C300 modular chassis to support its growing application landscape and its expanding global distribution channels. The benefits they derived from this are:
• Tangible increase in the LAN throughput
• More switching capacity to support on-demand server provisioning with virtualization
• Simplified deployment, faster troubleshooting and less chance of configuration errors
• Additional performance, flexibility and network control
How green is the Dell data center?
Dell ensures that every technology it develops contributes to power and energy saving. Dell has revolutionised the power and cooling of a datacenter. We raised the thermal envelope through our technology and reduced the power envelope. Our data centers have been designed to withstand a heat of 49 degrees and still run for 900 hours. We have done this to reduce the power envelope, as most offices have a certain ambient environment of about 30-32 degrees and our data centers can last in these temperatures without needing a specific environment. We provide the best cost of acquisition as well as the best cost of running.