Dell Pushes Converged Infrastructure With New Systems

Dell has made a number of announcements geared at helping businesses moving towards a converged IT infrastructure approach.

Converged infrastructure is an approach that seeks to minimise compatibility issues between servers, storage systems and network devices.

Converged Infrastructure

The first announcement is the Dell Validated System for Virtualisation, which it is touting as “the industry’s most flexible converged system to-date.”

The offering is described as a fully customisable, modular, self-service hybrid VMware cloud. It includes a wide range of equipment in various form-factors and deployment options. Dell claims that a “fully validated system can be configured, quoted and ordered in minutes, while automated lifecycle management tools allow customers to easily deploy, scale, and update the system.”

“For more than a decade, Dell and VMware have closely collaborated to help customers achieve greater efficiencies from their data centres and simplify IT operations,” said Jim Ganthier, VP and general manager, Dell Engineered Systems, HPC and Cloud. “With today’s announcements, we continue to demonstrate how our innovations can enable customers of all sizes to accelerate their journey to hyperconvergence, convergence, and the cloud.”

Another announcement concerns new client virtualisation solutions with improved performance for power users.

These include a number of different solutions, such as the Dell Solutions for VMware Virtual SAN Ready Nodes. This is a hyperconverged solution for desktop and application virtualisation that  provides flexible infrastructure optimised for virtual desktops. Dell says that deployment options range from a reference architecture to a fully configured VMware Virtual SAN appliance.

Dell has also incorporated support for the VMware Blast Extreme remote display protocol on Dell Windows Embedded thin clients running VMware Horizon 7 with Horizon Client 4.0. This allows Horizon end users to access their virtual desktops via a web browser or a full-featured VMware Horizon client.

Meanwhile the new Dell Precision Appliance for Wyse offers a fresh configuration based on the Dell PowerEdge R730 server and the NVIDIA Tesla M60 GRID 2.0 graphics card. It can cater for very high user density with up to 32 users per appliance.

Security Offerings

Stepping away from the client virtualisation side, Dell is also revealing two new security solutions. These aim to provide businesses with advanced threat protection for secure computing environments.

The offerings here is Dell Data Protection | Threat Defense for Windows Embedded (WES) thin clients and Dell Data Protection | Endpoint Security Suite Enterprise for persistent virtual machines.

The advanced threat protection is powered by Cylance and covers all most end point devices including thin clients and Mac OS systems, right through to the data centre.

“Organisations are looking to Dell to provide them with true end-to-end client virtualisation solutions that are easy to plan, deploy and run-– and take the guess work out of VDI,” said Steve Lalla, VP and general manager, Dell Commercial Client Software & Solutions. “The Dell VDI Solutions for VMware Virtual SAN Ready Nodes with Horizon and support for Blast Extreme remote protocol on Windows thin clients gives our customers solutions that are tailored for their environment, as well as high performance and manageability.”

Dell of course is currently in the process of completing the largest ever acquisition in tech history. Dell is purchasing storage giant EMC for a staggering $67 billion (£44bn).

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