Michael Dell: Going Green Is Key To Industry's Future

In a Wednesday keynote at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, Dell Chairman and CEO Michael Dell vowed to make the industry's future even greener.

Taking the stage to the pounding beat of George Thorogood's 'Who Do You Love?', Dell said that spiraling IT complexity and the fast growth of emerging markets are putting unprecedented strain on server and storage resources, and driving up power consumption in data centers.

Dell is responding by simplifying its client and data center offerings and rolling out services to assess complexity and simply IT environments. "The way I see it, the future must be greener," Dell said.

Next year, Dell will introduce reference architecture that Dell called a 'greenprint,' in an effort to help organizations identify inefficient process and develop ways of fixing them.

Dell is simplifying its client and data center infrastructure, and is also offering services that let organizations assess complexity in their IT environments. "Dell's top priority is to tackle this complexity head on. What better arena for us to compete in than power efficiency and performance?" Dell said.

After announcing plans to sell PowerEdge servers with Solaris installed direct to customers, Dell brought Dell CTO Kevin Kettler onstage to demonstrate dynamic workload migration between two Dell PowerEdge servers running Oracle's recently introduced Oracle VM virtual machine.

Kettler also gave a peek into Dell's next generation PowerEdge blade server, which is 10u in height and can hold 16 blades per chassis, and supports both Intel and AMD quad core blades. Kettler said airflow efficiency and real time power management make the blade 23 percent more energy efficient than similar offerings from competitors.

Dell gave a glimpse into new services that reduce management costs and simplify deployment tasks. One such service, Image Direct, lets customers develop their own custom PC images and upload them to Dell to be installed on the machines they buy, according to Dell.

"This tool allows significant cross platform re-use of images, and also allows images to be provisioned across multiple Dell machines," said Dell.

Another service called On Demand Desktop Streaming represents what Dell called "the next generation of client systems in the enterprise."

On Demand Desktop Streaming gives users the low maintenance requirements of thin clients and the performance of traditional clients, while also tightening data security because the client doesn't have a hard drive, Dell said.

Noting that Dell is also improving its client experience, Kettler showed off a soon-to-be-released Dell tablet PC with a 12.1 inch screen and a technology known as multitouch, which tracks user movements through multiple contact points on the screen.

While Kettler didn't specify specific scenarios, he did say that multitouch will present opportunities for Dell's partners. "The creativity, in terms of how to use multi-touch, is still untapped. But there will be an avenue for applications to be built around it," he said.