Dell talks Converged Infrastructure

Although it is late to the converged infrastructure party, the vendor is focusing strongly on SMBs and counting on the one-two punch of a direct plus channel play to see it through. By Prashant L Rao

Converged Infrastructure (CI) started with Cisco/EMC & VMware’s Vblock alliance and HP soon entered the fray with its CloudSystem Matrix and related solutions. IBM recently launched PureSystems and now it’s Dell’s turn to talk about Converged Infrastructure.

Philip A Davis, Vice President-Enterprise Solutions Group, Commercial Business Dell Asia Pacific & Japan Region, commented, “We are boosting our focus on the mid-market, which we define as companies with 300-5,000 employees. To do this, we have significantly ramped up our channel presence but we also work directly with some of these companies.”

With 40% of the Indian IT market (around $28 billion) working out to the tune of $11-12 billion being mid-market and 85% of that operating out of the top 25 cities, India has around 35,000 mid-market customers and Dell has close to 27,000 of those in its database.

The vendor’s contention is that SMBs are keen on integrated appliances and that’s where the Converged Infrastructure bit comes into play. It has vStart (shipped from the factory in a rack supporting 50, 100 or 200 virtual machines) that offers a combination of server, storage and networking with a self-service creator for both VMware and Hyper-V. There’s also a blade-level offering where you buy a blade chassis with networking, compute & storage blades.

“It’s more granular and you can scale as you go. It comes preconfigured from the factory,” added Davis.

The vendor also offers integrated workloads—VDI in a box (Citrix), BI in a box (Microsoft SQL Server), HANA as an appliance, Apache Hadoop or Cloudera Hadoop as an appliance etc.

Dell’s contention is that, unlike its competitors, it offers an integrated stack that can be broken into its components if the customer prefers it like that.

“We see the mid-market consuming more of the blade or workload offerings,” commented Davis.

Dell’s take is that trends such as CI take 8-10 years to transform the industry. “There are still people who want to buy piecemeal. As per IDC Q2 data, the fastest growth was in the blade segment. 1/2p servers continue to be deployed in remote offices while blades are proving popular in the data center,” added Davis.

“We see a lot of cases where people have a heterogeneous SAN environment. They don’t want to buy storage as a stack. As you move to a workload, however, customers care more about how many virtual desktops they can support and the BI/analytics performance. When it comes to legacy environments, people continue to leverage heterogeneous setups. That’s going to be the shape of the storage market for the next five years,” predicted Davis.

“The lower end of the mid-market prefers integrated stacks. In the upper end and large enterprise, it’s still external storage in a multi-tier architecture,” he added.

In terms of the server OS, Linux adoption continues to accelerate (Unix to Linux). “People are moving off old HP UX boxes to Linux. We recently acquired Make & Clerity for the migration,” said Davis.

With x86 becoming substantially more powerful with the last two chip generations, there are fewer Unix workloads that x86 can’t service. The memory space that x86 can address has also ramped up significantly.

“Customers of our entry-level PowerVault want greater disk density. We just announced a partnership with CommVault for that. That’s for customers who need more features but not necessarily a Compellent or EqualLogic,” said Davis.

Dell intends to bring out additional stacks built around Microsoft backoffice apps and other workloads.

“We are looking at mid-market ERP. That’s an interesting market opportunity to simplify deployment, provisioning, customization and obviate the need for services,” he concluded.

As per the vendor, Indian customers have deployed its CI solutions for desktop virtualization and office collaboration.