Dell Offers Self-Service Cloud Building

Peter Judge,

After virtualising data centres, Dell is now aiming at the “people part” in its VIS announcement

Dell has launched an IT management product which lets authorised end-users request standardised resources from a virtualised pool, taking a load off IT managers’ backs.

VIS Self Service Creator is part of Dell’s overall Virtual Integrated System architecture, which the company has been putting together since the start of this year. Like all such things, it’s a rats’ nest of acronyms which nestle in a nice block diagram (below). Within VIS, Dell has already offered the hardware part, Advanced Infrastructure Management, which pools hardware resources in a virtualised data centre.

Now for the people part

“This goes beyond rack-and-stack and addresses the ‘people’ part of the IT continuum,” said Ed English, head of large enterprise marketing at Dell. The offering is more capable of multi-vendor integration than similar ones from vendors like HP or Cisco, he said. VIS also supports multiple hypervisors – or at least, Hyper/V and VMware.

Dell also launched some improvements to AIM, including better VMware Vsphere, and easier support for10GbE and FCOE networks.

The company also promised a “Director” module for VIS, which will be a “command and control hub” for converged data centres, giving the ability to respond to quality of service issues in real-time.

Responding more quickly to capacity requirements has unexpected side effects, said English. Most organisations build in over-capacity of 35 percent, because it takes a long while to respond to increased demand. If new resources can be provisioned quickly, this takes away the need for so much overprovision, and cuts costs, he said.

Underlying the strategy is a reliance on the all-conquering march of x86 servers and open standards, said English. He believes these forces will eventually wipe out all vendors’ efforts to restrict customers – assuring us that Dell does not suffer from those tendencies.

Dells’s strategy is based on acquistions such as Scalent and Kace.

Cisco’s Nexus offering requires users to upgrade from older switches, said English, while the Dell VIS scheme is compatible with existing kit. HP’s Matrix, he said, is more focused on the hardware part of the equation.