Dell Lays Foundation for Next-Generation Data Center

Up-and-Coming Open Source Projects for the Enterprise

As part of a concerted effort to build next-generation data center architectures on x86 processors, Dell today unveiled a series of alliances coupled with product offerings that are intended to collectively modernize enterprise IT.

According to Marius Haas, chief commercial officer and president of Dell enterprise solutions, the end goal is to deliver a fully integrated, compute, memory, network fabric and storage architecture that moves hot data as close as possible to the processor over a four-gigabit backbone at a fraction of the cost of rival offerings.

To achieve that goal, Dell announced at the Dell World 2013 conference a partnership with Red Hat under which it both resells the Red Hat distribution of the OpenStack cloud management platform and contributes to its ongoing development in the form of Dell engineering resources.

With enterprise servers now being routinely deployed inside and outside of traditional data centers, Dell is also expanding its cloud alliances to include reselling cloud services provided by Google, Microsoft and CenturyLink.

In addition, Dell previewed a Fluid Cache for SAN offering that combines all of its data center technologies in a package that will be capable of delivering 5 million IOPs per second of random reads across a Dell PowerEdge 720 cluster.

Coupled with recent Dell advances in storage and networking announced earlier this week and partnerships with VMware, Microsoft and now Red Hat, Dell is trying to make a case for replacing legacy data center infrastructure with any one of a number of modern x86 architectures that are both less costly to acquire and rapidly becoming easier to manage.

The degree to which Dell succeeds in doing that against server rivals that are trying to make similar cases for converged infrastructure remains to be seen. But fresh off of going private, it’s clear that Dell plans to be both technologically and financially aggressive in staking its claim to next-generation data centers.