In the midst of a worldwide recession, USD 450 billion a year is
being spent on building new data center space. Intel CEO Paul
Otellini noted that figure in his talk at Dell World last week,
citing it as "one of the world's more significant capital
investments."
A good share of this capital spending is being done by the likes of
Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon.com, and cloud service
suppliers, who base their operations on the Intel/AMD, x86 chip
architecture. Even when it's an enterprise building a data center,
I suspect the bulk will use x86 commodity hardware. These days, x86
systems account for a little over half of server revenues, but 95
percent of unit shipments. New data centers are being filled with
x86.
It's not news that Dell is a primary supplier of x86 systems, but
it's always ranked a distant third to HP and IBM in listings of
server sales--that's in all types of servers and the measure is by
revenue. In the first half of 2011, however, IDC figures indicate
that Dell led HP and IBM in x86 revenues in North America for the
first time. What's become a pattern in computing in North America
sometimes presages what's about to become a pattern throughout the
world. We'll see if the first half was an aberration or a harbinger
of a future Dell power in x86 servers.
My own hunch is that it foretells solid things for Dell. But to
consolidate its position as a leader in x86 architecture, it needs
to accelerate some of the moves it's carefully made over the past
three years--moves that are farsighted and frankly somewhat
unDell-like. In the past, Dell has been a shuffler of x86 machine
parts behind an effective electronic supply chain. Now what's
needed is improvement of basic x86 technologies, not just the CPU,
to fill a larger role. The critical question: Is Dell going to lead
in this build out of the x86 data center, which you can also think
of as the expansion of the private cloud, or merely ride along?
CEO Michael Dell said at Dell World, "This is a new Dell that
you're looking at today." Let's take a look at Dell's recent moves
and announcements and test that proposition.
Dell is now offering vStart systems, which are rack-mount server
packages designed to function as a unit in the virtualized part of
the data center. It's undeniable that the virtualized part will
soon be the majority of the data center, and Dell has wisely teamed
up with partners to put together these vStart rack assemblies that
come with virtualized storage and networking built in. The packages
are preconfigured, pre-wired, and pretested. VStart comes in three
sizes meant to host 50 virtual machines, 100 virtual machines, or
200 virtual machines, with a starting price of about USD 50,000 for
the 50 VM rack. They are configured as ready to run Microsoft's
Hyper-V or VMware ESX Server--virtualization software included.
Dell uses its PowerConnect switches and PowerEdge servers as
well.
The storage included in vStart is Dell's EqualLogic arrays. Dell
purchased EqualLogic in 2007 for USD 1.4 billion, an unprofitable
company at the time that marked a bold addition to its basic
PowerVault storage option. EqualLogic was the first iSCSI storage
vendor to be certified to work with VMware, and Dell is an advocate
of iSCSI as a basis for supplying converged networking--one network
for the storage SAN and Ethernet communications--to virtual machine
hosts. Of Dell's customers using virtualization, 80% of them use
VMware, Michael Dell said at Dell World.
By pre-integrating these components, Dell is solving a number of
problems that normally confront the IT staff as it builds out the
virtualized portion of the data center. Those staffs that have been
doing virtualization a long time, learning virtualization as they
go, don't need vStart. Those that are still learning or seeking a
shortcut to full implementation of virtualized networking and
storage as well as servers might consider such a package. The
assembly's management data output plugs into VMware's vCenter
management console or Microsoft's System Center's Virtual Machine
Manager.