As part of its US$1 billion investment this year towards solutions, services and the cloud, Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) has announced new solutions to help businesses build and manage virtual and cloud-based infrastructures.
Among its new solutions include vStart which aims to accelerate an end-user’s migration path to virtualization and cloud, E-mail and File Archive and Desktop Virtualization Solutions.
Dell’s vStart solution aims to accelerate a customer’s journey to the cloud and will be delivered by its direct sales force and network of channel partners.
Steve Schuckenbrock, president, Dell Services, said vStart is a complete virtual infrastructure solution that comes “ready to deploy” to run both physical and virtual workloads.
VStart currently supports VMware environments and support for other hypervisors is also planned for the future, Schuckenbrock added. The solution has the ability to run either 100 or 200 virtual machines from a single management environment, at a price point of US$99,000 and $169,000 respectively.
Dell also has a new E-mail and File Archive solution which helps end-users better manage their data and allows them to achieve better optimization and meet compliance requirements.
The company’s new Desktop Virtualization Solutions help businesses more quickly deploy desktop virtualization inside their organizations by offering support to virtually anyone on any device, anytime, anywhere, Schuckenbrock said.
Both the vStart and Desktop Virtualization Solutions are expected to be released in Canada in Q2 of this year.
To complement these new solutions, the company also announced a three-year strategic partnership with Microsoft to help customers with their virtualization and private cloud endeavors. As part of this, Schuckenbrock said Dell’s virtualization solutions will be based on Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V.
As part of its $1billion pledged investment, over the next 24 months, Schuckenbrock said Dell will build data centres around the world to support its customers’ public and private cloud infrastructures and for IT outsourcing. The company is planning to build 12 Global Solution Centres this year and plans to build 10 more in the next 18 months, he added.
“We’re not trying to go after hosting companies with the creation of our new data centres,” Schuckenbrock said. “Instead, we want to enable our customers with their cloud infrastructures.”
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