Dell Workload-Specific and Converged Infrastructure Appliances

Dell has recently introduced a series of new enterprise appliances and integrated systems to drive simplicity and ease of use across the data centre, and help customers achieve quicker business insights and agility. The new workload-specific infrastructure appliances and integrated systems dramatically speed deployment, management and time to results for companies of all sizes.

 Dell is teaming up with leading enterprise software companies to integrate and optimise Dell infrastructure and management capabilities, with some of the most widely deployed applications and workloads in enterprises today. Dell is moving quickly to deliver appliances to accelerate the value customers get from their technology by simplifying the deployment and management of large-scale enterprise applications, while at the same time ensuring best-in-class performance, response times, and insights to critical business data.

 “Dell is focused on making it easier for businesses to solve their IT challenges so they can spend more time thinking about their customers and less on operations.  We do this in part by helping businesses quickly, reliably and cost-effectively stand up tier-1 applications, and  the appliances and integrated systems announced today help accelerate the value customers can get from their technology,” said Marius Haas, chief commercial officer and president of enterprise solutions, Dell. “The new solutions we announced a joint partnership with Oracle, Cloudera and Nutanix are first of many new workload-specific solutions Dell will introduce in the coming quarters.”

 "Dell Acceleration Appliance for Databases combines industry-leading Dell servers and proven Fusion-io flash memory to maximise data-intensive application performance,” said Fusion-io CEO and Chairman of the Board Shane Robison. “Our technology collaboration enables enterprises to gain business insight from real time information by improving application performance and shortening application response times, ultimately increasing competitive advantage.”

 “Data systems of the ‘80s and ‘90s were never designed for what is known as big data. It’s not that the world was never data-driven before – it’s that we are amassing more data today than systems are able to consume,” said Mike Olson, co-founder and chief strategy officer, Cloudera. “Traditional systems isolate data and create silos that make exploration and collaboration hard. By putting that data into a modern enterprise data hub, customers can combine it and analyse it in powerful new ways. The collaboration among Dell, Intel and Cloudera to build this new engineered system makes it easier than ever before for enterprises to deploy an enterprise data hub that’s fast, scalable and affordable.” 

 In a recent report industry analyst firm IDC noted, the integrated systems and appliances market is one of the fastest-growing segments of the IT industry. As enterprises look to simplify and streamline IT capabilities, they will turn more and more toward these solution sets to help reduce the burden on their IT departments and provide a better SLA to their corporate users. Vendors will continue to develop more sophisticated tools to manage these stacks more efficiently and integrate more software packages for customers to choose from. In addition, they will continue to partner with one another to help bring these solution sets to fruition.

 Dell introduced the Dell Acceleration Appliance for Databases, a pre-built, pre-integrated appliance designed to accelerate leading database environments including MySQL, Sybase, Microsoft SQL and MongoDB. This solution includes Dell PowerEdge Servers, Dell Storage and Dell Networking, with application acceleration technology from Fusion-io to improve database performance, enabling large and midsize customers to cost-effectively respond to business needs rapidly and reliably.

Dell also is shipping Fluid Cache for SAN, which brings data closer to the server while improving application performance and reducing response times for scale-out workloads that require high levels of concurrent usage. 

 In addition to the Dell Application Acceleration for Databases appliance, Dell also announced a purpose-built appliance designed specifically for Oracle 12c database deployments.  The Dell Integrated Systems for Oracle 12c Database appliance helps customers migrate to and accelerate current Oracle 12c environments. Now customers from small businesses to large enterprises can quickly stand up new Oracle database deployments with a high-performance appliance that meets their database management needs today, and can easily scale in the future.

 Extending the base configuration available in the Dell Application Acceleration for Databases appliance with Oracle 12c database pre-installed customers will experience significant performance gains and cost savings over similar pre-packaged appliance solutions. The Dell Database Acceleration Appliance for Oracle pre-bundles Dell infrastructure, with Oracle Linux, Oracle VM, Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Fusion Applications removing from customers the hassle of hardware integration and fine-tuning of applications.

 Dell is building on its deep expertise and relationship working with Cloudera and Intel to launch new Dell In-Memory Appliances for Cloudera Enterprise aimed at accelerating Hadoop deployments. The market for Hadoop is expected to grow to $50.2 billion by 2020[2], a compound annual growth rate of nearly 60 percent. Businesses of all sizes are using big data to inform and make business critical decisions, so they need access to effective real-time data analytics.

The appliances will bundle leading Dell technology with Cloudera Enterprise (Data Hub Edition including Apache Spark), and Intel’s performance and security optimised chipset, to help organisations capitalise on high-performance data analysis. The solution represents a unique collaboration within the big data ecosystem to collectively deliver a solution that no single vendor can provide.

The Dell In-Memory Appliances for Cloudera Enterprise simplify and speed up otherwise complex Hadoop cluster deployments, enabling customers to gain critical business insights faster. It is also massively scalable, using an enterprise data hub to store and analyse any amount or type of data in its original form and for as long as desired or required. This ease of deployment and scalability meet the needs of small and medium businesses, all the way up to the largest enterprises. 

It includes leading Dell hardware, Cloudera Enterprise (Data Hub Edition including Apache Spark) for easier management and compatibility within existing data centre environments, Intel Architecture for fast processing, and ScaleMP’s Versatile SMP (vSMP) architecture to aggregate multiple x86 servers into a single virtual machine to create large memory pools for in-memory processing. The Dell In-Memory Appliances for Cloudera Enterprise will be available in pre-sized, pre-configured options so customers can choose and quickly deploy the version that is right for their deployment.

Dell today also announced plans to deliver the Dell XC Series of Web-scale Converged Appliances powered by Nutanix. With the announcement, Dell extends its software defined storage portfolio with plans to offer customers a new series of appliances, which combine compute, storage and networking into a single offering. These new appliances will benefit customers seeking an integrated IT approach, offering simple deployment, management and scale as needed.

 These announcements of new engineered solutions from Dell represent the next step in the company’s ongoing efforts to help businesses of all sizes realise greater returns on their investments in enterprise applications, and accelerate value from their technology. Dell recently introduced joint partner solutions, reference architectures and certifications with Oracle, SAP, Red Hat and Microsoft, and Scale Up Certifications for SAP HANA, for easy scaling of server memory capacity in deployments and helps reduce the need to “rip and replace” when systems are upgraded. And Dell has partnered with Red Hat to offer private cloud solutions based on OpenStack to help customers move to and deploy highly scalable cloud computing models.