Dell's Virtualization Vision Comes To Life

Dell has launched several new products optimized for virtualization offerings, including two new blade servers, new iSCSI storage arrays for virtual server environments, new services around virtualization, and it has expanded its relationship with Microsoft to include that vendor's Hyper-V virtualization software, according to the Round Rock, Texas-based vendor.

Included in the new product offerings is the new PowerEdge M905 blade server, pictured here, which starts at $4,999.

The new blade servers were "designed from the ground up for virtualization," said Sally Stevens, director of server platform marketing at Dell.

The M905, a 4-socket AMD blade, features three highly available, fully redundant I/O fabrics, and eight high-speed ports, Stevens said.

Said Stevens about the M905, "We have eight [high-speed] ports. HP has five. We also have the best power performance in the industry. Virtual servers thrive on shared storage, which is why Dell designed the servers with more robust bandwidth, even on the switch side."

The M905 also features 24 DIMMs, 50 percent more than HP and IBM 4-socket blades, according to Dell.

The PowerEdge M805 is the two-socket version and starts at $1,699, according to Dell.

The M805 blade features 16 DIMMs, which is 33 percent more than HP's BL480c and the same amount of DIMM capacity in competitors' four-socket blades, according to Dell.

On the storage side, Dell introduced a new EqualLogic SAN array. The PS5500E triples the capacity of the company's previous virtualization-optimized storage products from EqualLogic. The SATA device has 24 or 48 TB capacity. The vendor also is introducing EqualLogic VMware Auto-Snapshot Manager/VMware edition and Citrix Xenserver integration with the EqualLogic PS series, according to Asthana.



"It's not enough just to offer storage, you need to integrate as much as possible. Storage is one of biggest pain points when you deploy server virtualization," said Praveen Asthana, director of worldwide storage marketing.

The PS5500E also includes a number of services such as thin provisioning, replication, virtualization, tiered storage, instant volume expansion, and volume cloning, according to Dell. Users can scale up to 576 TB under one management interface. The device is useful for tiered storage, disaster recovery and large SAN solutions, according to Dell.