Dell on Tuesday unveiled an expanded range of converged infrastructure products, opening the technology, which Dell had previously pitched to large enterprises, to new classes of customers. Designed to simplify daily IT tasks and enable companies to more rapidly provision and deploy virtual machines, the offerings not only combine storage, networking, and computing into a single chassis but also bring all components under the control of a single management console.
The announcements could help Dell — which has soldiered this year through both the PC market’s decline and CEO Michael Dell’s ongoing bid to take the company private — to assert the software and service capabilities it has built over the last several years. The converged infrastructure space is ripe for growth, and a leading role could convince many of Dell’s critics that the company has truly, as its founder and CEO declared last December, outgrown its PC roots. Dell faces competition from HP, Cisco and others, but with its newly diversified line-up, the company hopes to stand out from the crowd.
The new hardware and software products, all of which were revealed during this week’s Dell Enterprise Forum in San Jose, Calif., include the PowerEdge VRTX, which targets small enterprises, remote offices and other environments where space, power and IT resources are at a premium. Dell claims the VRTX uses up to 86% fewer cables than non-converged products, and that a new system can be installed and set to deploy virtual machines within a matter of hours. The product can handle four servers running as many as 100 virtual machines each, as well as up to 50 TB of shared storage.
Dell has not revealed specific pricing, but a basic system should be less than $ 10,000. PowerEdge VRTX bundles will go on sale June 26 and will include Chassis Management Controller, which allows IT to manage the complete system from a single pane of glass.