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Dell is upping the ante in the coming war with such vendors as HP and Cisco over converged infrastructures by introducing new storage and server products along with pre-configured solutions using virtualization technology from VMware and Microsoft.
Dell on Wednesday unveiled new EqualLogic and PowerVault storage arrays along with new PowerEdge blade servers, several of which include SSDs for high-performance storage operations.
The company also unveiled six new Dell Business Ready Configurations which offer pre-configured solutions including servers, storage, networking, and VMware or Microsoft virtualization.
The new hardware and solutions come at a time when some of the top IT vendors are trying to lock data center customers in and competitors with converged infrastructure plans.
Converged infrastructure is the tight integration of server, storage, networking, virtualization, and other resources tied together as part of a single-vendor data center solution.
Such a solution can be managed as a single system. Its resources can be dynamically allocated as needed, providing higher resource utilization and availability than possible with static infrastructures.
Primary vendors fighting for leadership of the converged infrastructure bandwagon include Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM. They are either building their solutions with their own storage, server, networking, and virtualization technology, or working with partners to fill in those technologies they currently lack.
For a vendor like Dell, which has traditionally relied on hardware for the bulk of its revenue, the stakes in the converged infrastructure market are high because once a customer settles on a data center-wide solution, it is hard for other vendors to get in.
The importance of getting a piece of the converged infrastructure business is made more urgent by the fact that, as businesses start adopting cloud computing, the vendor with the bulk of a data center's IT business will be the front runner for connecting to the cloud.
Next: Dell Fills Out Its Converged Infrastructure Technology
