Two very large clouds have been hanging over Dell for most of the year: the flailing PC market, and CEO Michael Dell’s ongoing attempt to take the company private. Despite these distractions, Dell itself has spent 2013 doing exactly what it did at the end of 2012: launching new enterprise products and declaring that its transition from PC maker to end-to-end solution provider has concluded.
That trend continued Wednesday at the Citrix Synergy conference in Anaheim, where Dell announced a range of cloud computing products for Citrix-based environments, including options that support Citrix XenDesktop 7, also unveiled on Wednesday. Dell hopes the moves will diversify its revenue streams, which are currently reliant on its low-margin PC business.
The announcements include a version of Dell’s Active System 800 converged infrastructure line optimized for Citrix XenDesktop. The product is a pre-integrated system that fits server, storage and networking into a modest footprint. It includes Active System Manager, which facilitates single pane management of both physical and virtual assets.
Dell is also offering two reference architectures that add additional features to the Active System 800 configuration. One supports NVIDIA’s GRID and targets users whose virtualized graphics needs are particularly demanding, and the other includes a local storage option that Dell says will drive down costs by eliminating the need for SAN.