Dell Stakes Its Claim In Converged Infrastructure And Integrated System Markets

DellTechCamp Highlights

• Demonstrates the strength of its software assets in EMEA
• Announces Active System 800 and associated ASM 7.0 and 7.1 from newly-acquired Gale Technologies
• Announces 3 new ‘scalable’ SAP HANA appliances
• Demonstrates the KACE K3000 for MDM use
• Is focusing on integration and automation to save its customers time and money in deploying systems
• Will compete well in Converged Infrastructure and Integrated Systems markets

Amsterdam was the location for DellTechCamp this week, which was led by Aongus Hegarty and Marius Haas, presidents respectively of EMEA and Enterprise Solutions. You’ll be interested to learn about how the value of its offerings has improved through its numerous acquisitions and our take on its challenges.

Software Group Speed Dating

It’s not a new story for us that Dell has become a serious Enterprise supplier through smart acquisitions of companies with relevant IP – we’ve been covering these developments for a couple of years now. On this occasion a panel from the software acquisitions ran through their credentials, describing the session as a kind of speed dating. Important insights included:

• KACE, which now claims 1.1k customers in EMEA and has recently added support for iOS and Android clients to its systems management appliances
• Wyse, has sold 80 million devices since is foundation in 1981 (we place it in second position behind HP in the thin client market shipments); it also has extensive experience in management software of course
• Quest has 272 products and 1.3k staff, including 190 sales people in EMEA
• SonicWall, which has shipped 2 million appliances and protecting over 40 million end-users according to its estimates
• Secureworks, which provides threat management to its 3.8k customers worldwide; its staff make up most of Dell’s 1k security professionals worldwide
• Gale Technologies, which is a relatively new supplier of infrastructure automation software; it was acquired in November 2012; it had itself acquired the assets of Virtiv in March allowing it to support Linux and KVM areas; it had around 100 deployments and prestigious customers such as Alcatel Lucent, Ericsson and Verizon

Not represented on the panel were Scalent, Boomi and AppAssure – not to mean they’re necessarily unimportant. Dell is working to integrate the people and products of these companies under the leadership of John Swainson into the $1.5 billion a year Software Group. See our earlier article for more details.

Enhancing Pre-Integrated Systems With Active System 800 And Active System Manager 7.x

Dell launched its first range of pre-integrated vStart systems back in 2011, which include the 50 (c. $60k), 100 (c. $140k), 200 (c.$240k) and 1000 (c. $1.5 million). With vStart the aim is turnkey virtualisation for private Clouds, with model numbering coming from the number of Virtual Machines each system would run. It has 2 flavours – the 50m running Microsoft Hyper-V and costing slightly more than the 50v running VMware.
We expect the newly introduced 800 to be the first of a series of Active Systems which will eventually replace the vStart line over time. It has loftier ambitions this time, allowing upgrades and enhancements and for physical as well as virtual applications – so the ‘800’ no longer applies to the number of VMs to be run.
Active Systems Manager 7.0 is the newly announced infrastructure automation suite at the heart of the new system, replacing the Scalent/ DynamicOps code used in Advanced Infrastructure Manager running on vStart. VMware’s acquisition of DynamicOps made a new approach necessary, demonstrating why it makes sense for suppliers like Dell to buy companies rather than partner with them in the infrastructure software area.
We’ll be mightily impressed if Dell meets its February delivery schedule in the US for the software, given it only acquired Gale in the middle of November. The Dell version will lack the heterogeneous management features at first, although in future we believe it could be extended to cover NetApp and EMC storage, Cisco switches and the like.
Once they’ve delivered 7.0 the engineers won’t be able to relax however as they intend to launch version 7.1 in May, which will go out to European countries as well as the US and include Templates – which are the automation of set up procedures and scripts created by those setting up the infrastructure, provisioning the systems and implementing software for the first time – similar in a way to IBM Patterns used in its Pure Systems.

Scalable SAP HANA OLAP Appliances

Dell also launched 3 (1TB, 2TB and 4TB) scalable appliances for SAP’s in-memory OLAP software, which join the 3 (128GB, 256GB and 512GB) single server versions introduced in March 2012. Like other HANA appliances Dell has to use Intel’s Xeon E7 chips, choosing the 4-core 4870 rather than 8-core 8870s for all its current machines. The boxes use 2 PowerEdge R910s and a R620 as a management node with Compellent storage and PowerConnect switches. SAP has changed its strategy from allowing its software to be run on any server to certifying each platform HANA runs on. We believe that it will adopt this approach for other new products in future, effectively forcing an appliance approach and design on all of its OEMS.

KACE K3000 Mobility Management

In December Dell announced the KACE K3000 mobile device management appliance for delivery in April 2013. At the show it demonstrated how a user could access applications on work laptops, workstations, smart phones and tablets (including iOS and Android), while managers could implement identity management and password policies effectively to protect corporate data. It showed how a company could wipe just the corporate data on a user’s device if he, or she left the company; or the whole device if it was stolen.
We’ve been impressed with KACE (now in Dell’s Client Management Software Group) for some years and we consider this to be true workload-optimised systems, albeit for small to mid-market customers. If you’re interested in mobile device management you might also want to read our articles on Kaseya and HP.

Some Conclusions – Pre-Integration Saves Customers Time And Money

In our view the automation of repetitive set up tasks and shortening of deployment time makes the Active System 800 a strong contender in the Converged Infrastructure market, although its scalability and configuration choices mean that it’s not Pre-Integrated System per se.
We see no reason why ASM can’t be used on all Dell systems eventually, giving the same advantages to small, medium and large users alike.
The scalable SAP HANA boxes are pre-integrated systems with 1TB, 2TB and 4TB versions and using the same Intel E7 chips as all other vendor versions. These are application-specific appliances with pre-defined configurations based on SAP’s requirements for its in-memory OLAP suite.
The KACE K3000 is the closest Dell gets to a true workload-optimised appliance at Dell – known for its system management abilities rather than its software or hardware specs.
Through its numerous acquisitions and existing knowledge of data centre needs Dell has taken bold steps towards transforming itself into a modern full range supplier.
Let’s hope the news of its new data centre offerings don’t get eclipsed by its organisational announcements: more importantly let’s hope it will continue to help its customers save time and money irrespective of any organisational changes it may make in the coming year.