ROUND ROCK, Texas—(BUSINESS WIRE)—March 25, 2009— Answering the new economic challenges faced by customers large and small, Dell today debuted a breakthrough portfolio of products and services specifically designed to help businesses become more efficient throughout the IT lifecycle and maximize their most valuable resources: people, time and money. The combination of innovative software and services with next-generation storage and server products, offers customers technology solutions specifically designed to cut costs and increase efficiency.

“Data center operations require a holistic view to reduce overall operational costs, whether that is people, time or money over a technology lifecycle,” said Michelle Bailey, VP of Enterprise Platforms and Data Center Trends at IDC. “Dell is focused on how it integrates and aligns the enterprise technologies across its product portfolio to help companies simplify and manage their organizations’ IT infrastructure.”

The News:

• The new 11^th Generation PowerEdge servers and Precision workstations based on the next generation of Intel’s Xeon(R) processors give customers phenomenal performance, exceptional management capabilities and thermals that help customers make the most of their IT infrastructure.
  • The new PowerEdge portfolio will offer optimal virtualization, system management, and usability capabilities while Dell’s PowerEdge R710 provides the industry’s best performance per watt¹. Embedded in all new 11^th Generation PowerEdge servers is the new Dell Lifecycle Controller that delivers integrated manageability through a single access point.
• Dell M-series blade architecture has 27 percent lower acquisition cost and delivers 17 percent lower TCO over 5 years per rack compared to HP c-Class².
  • Dell ImageDirect Server simplifies transitions and image management for servers. Companies can now create and manage server images and have them factory-installed, eliminating time-consuming manual configuration, reducing deployment and IT staff time by up to 45 percent. Dell ImageDirect allows the rapid stabilization of new servers with ready to deploy optimized configurations and a reduction of unwanted drift from desired configuration states at the time of deployment.
• The new Dell Precision T7500, T5500 and T3500 tower workstations provide one of the market’s broadest set of ISV certifications and are purpose-built for engineering, media, entertainment and biosciences industries. Select configurations of the new workstations have achieved Energy Star 5.0 certification.
• Dell challenges HP’s proprietary management framework with the introduction of Dell Management Console (DMC), a software solution powered by Altiris(TM) from Symantec, designed to unite systems management across IT environments into a single console. Dell’s standards-based, open approach to manageability includes tight integration with world-class systems management solutions. A comparable solution from HP requires up to 9 consoles³. DMC can reduce or eliminate manual systems management processes, allowing businesses to save time and money that can be redirected to more strategic technology use.
• Dell today also announced new EqualLogic PS6000 storage arrays that offer customers increased performance, advanced virtualization capabilities and even greater value than previous generations. To help enterprises preserve and extend their existing investments, the PS6000 series integrates seamlessly into existing EqualLogic storage area networks (SANs) to form a virtualized pool of storage. Dell is unveiling SAN Headquarters, a centralized dashboard that monitors performance and events for dozens of PS Series groups, potentially more than 10 PB of SAN storage. SAN Headquarters is available to any EqualLogic customer with a support agreement at no additional cost.
• Data Center Consulting improves data center performance and reduces costs for customers — appreciably reducing data center hardware costs through server virtualization and storage/backup optimization. With tools and technology, Dell delivers specific and measurable outcomes within days and weeks not months and years.
• New Systems Management Consulting and tools improve data center operations from server provisioning and maintenance, to availability monitoring and service-level management through asset retirement.

What this means for customers:

More than ever, Large Enterprise CIOs and IT Decision Makers are being challenged to cut their budgets yet continue to drive innovation. Dell’s new portfolio of products and services cut costs and complexity in the data center through world-class virtualization capabilities, embedded management and storage solutions that provide phenomenal performance and outstanding value.

In the realities of today’s economic environment, Small and Medium Businesses need easy-to-manage and reliable IT solutions with exceptional value to stay productive and competitive. Designed for growing businesses, Dell’s new portfolio of products and services can help customers easily and efficiently expand a growing business with reliable, easy to use, secure, and scalable solutions.