It's all about the solutions: Dell
Megatrends tackled with fistful of improvements and releases in Frankfurt
Dell unveiled a raft of offerings at its EMEA Enterprise Forum and says channel partners should go end to end to maximise the return.
Marius Haas, chief commercial officer and president of enterprise solutions at Dell, said the firm is aiming for the whole to be more than the sum of its parts when it comes to any one offering.
With that in mind, software specialist partners could look at profitable ways of incorporating hardware into their portfolio and vice versa, for example.
"IT leaders are facing the challenge of balancing costs with the need to provide bleeding-edge IT services to ensure businesses do not risk losing customers, revenue or productivity," Haas said.
Megatrends like cloud, mobility and big data are in sharp focus. The smorgasbord at Dell Enterprise Forum meant to tempt channel included a one-to-many datacentre monitoring mobile application, and improvements to storage software.
The OEM is particularly excited about the prospects for Fluid Cache for SAN, which has achieved five million random read input/output per second (IOPS) coupled with improved average database response times in lab conditions, helping reduce cost per user and increase the number of users.
"The fact of the matter is handling increased traffic of any kind puts strain on a datacentre – and many solutions in the market only address parts of the problem," Haas said. "Dell is providing businesses with a unique application acceleration solution that helps increase agility and be more responsive to their customers."
New Compellent Storage Center software focuses on improving use of flash, boosting performance and tiering. There were also OpenManage systems management and EqualLogic host integration portfolio updates.
Hardware to be shipped later this year included the Z9500 Ethernet fabric switch, accompanied by Active Fabric Controller software for easy provisioning of virtualised networks.
The PowerEdge VRTX server-and-storage box with integrated management is getting new "enterprise-class" features to enhance its abilities within a remote or branch office network.
Round Rock also announced fruit of its OpenStack partnership with Red Hat – private-cloud offerings aimed at facilitating flexible and dynamic services around mobility, social network and analytics. Dell is integrating Red Hat's OpenShift PaaS as a next step to co-engineering better Linux containers.
Paul Cormier, president for products and technologies at Red Hat, said in a statement: "Cloud innovation is happening first in open source, and what we're seeing from global customers is growing demand for open hybrid cloud solutions that meet a wide variety of requirements."
In the security arena, Dell announced new SecureWorks advanced end-point threat detection services and secure mobile VPN access, as well as Hardware Crypto Accelerator, which makes hard drives self-encrypting.
Many of the releases were being announced for the first time, with the US edition of Dell's Enterprise Forum 2014 not happening until June.