S. Sridhar, Director, Enterprise Solutions Business, Dell India discusses with Jasmine Desai about Dell’s latest offering PowerEdge VRTX, shares insight into its features and converged infrastructure market in India. Excerpts…
What were the finding of Dell’s study that led to the introduction of PowerEdge VRTX?
A lot of feedback from large customers was around remote and branch offices requirement. From mid-market customers, it was about targeted workloads in terms of unified management capability, being able to move onto converged infrastructure at an optimal cost and at the same time ready themselves for the cloud. Also the hassle free-work environment with ready to use design.
Tell us about the design and features of Dell PowerEdge VRTX?
It is a revolutionary product rather than an evolutionary one. Dell PowerEdge VRTX is a fresh new design that is uncomplicated in terms of requirements and high in scaling. There is a need in the market of a nice compact unit that gives flexibility of a rack, has a server, storage and network and which is capable of being monitored from a single console. It combines four blade servers, has capability to go up to 48 TB of storage, eight 1-GB ethernet ports in 5U rackspace.
It is a very robust design, capable of being managed from a single chassis management console. It retains the flexibility of adding full length low profile PCI card and brings the density of blade capability in terms of single backplane aggregation. Also, it is right-sized for requirements of categories. For example, large banks which need branch offices and need applications running there, especially in rural areas, corporates going to remote locations.
Smaller organizations without mature IT will do very well with this kind of design because they will have far lesser complications to take care of. We have taken care of thermals and acoustic design so much that you can have it next to your desk as a complete data center-in-a-box kind of solution. It can be termed as converged infrastructure.
How do you gauge the need for converged infrastructure in Indian market?
The way we look at convergence is in three parts. First is infrastructure layer which is at the core of a design, second layer is the management or operations tool and the third part is applications and service delivery. While organizations understand the requirement of BYOD, the questions remains about the delivery applications, cloud readiness, security requirement and others are part of third layer that will enable convergence. The adoption of converged infrastructure has taken up partly but its in varying degrees. Various organizations are passing through the stage where they have the right kind of virtualized environment or their applications are ready for cloud, etc. However, most organizations have put themselves on the path towards convergence.
What will Poweredge VRTX mean for existing Dell customers?
We work with really large customers. For example, BFSI customers will be looking at automating branches. Do they need rack or full-fledged chassis built solutions which gives flexibility of a rack and gives capability of blade? Customers like IT need to have proper fire walled infrastructure and might need 400 VMs that they need to log in from remote areas in foreign locations. Many customers are not comfortable sharing physical infrastructure, but are open to VMs. It provides flexibility and ready to use kind of infrastructure that no competitor can do. IT surveillance is playing a very important role. Various government departments are looking at it. This becomes a wonderful solution with storage integrated into it. For retail customers it is a very unified set-up. Any industry can fit onto this.
How do you see its preference over cloud among SMB customers?
When you look at automating applications or loading it on the cloud, the business is the ultimate user and not the IT. The resistance to change becomes the problem with IT. Businesses look at IT not as part of the cost-center but as part of the business and charging back to the business. It depends on the kind of applications they are using, the kind of model they have set-up, some have in-house data center and DR is outsourced. There are customers who wants everything outsourced but still go for this solution and have it hosted from outside. For cloud as a usage model, this product can be at the core of the usage model. While, they can go for cloud and also can go for this as one does not obviate the other.
