VMworld 2009: Dell developing 'virtual ready infrastructure'

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Speaker: The other area that we want to now focus on is the tool sets. How do you optimize so that you need fewer tools, that you don't have to have a tool for every task that you talked about. Well, let's reduce the tasking. Instead of making it a nonlinear equation of complexity, I think our goal is to make it much more of a linear equation that's easier to manage. What do I mean by that? Well, the way we're going to talk about task compression and optimized delivery is through a couple of concepts that we are developing. One is called "virtual-ready infrastructure," and the other one is called "dynamic IT." In virtual-ready infrastructure, the key concept we have is zero touch deployment. The fact of the matter is your infrastructure should pretty much just work. You should be able to add new blades, new servers, new storage. It should be auto discovered. It should be auto configured based on images and policies that were already set, and should be up and running. It shouldn't take five weeks to bring up IT infrastructure. It should take 30 minutes to an hour. That's the kind of change that we're focusing on with our initiatives here. And we have a number of examples on virtual-ready infrastructure. Ecologic, as I mentioned before, our provisioning and our blades, chassis, we're doing a number of things to make this as fast as possible. The work we're doing with scalent phonetic really helps us provide a virtual-ready infrastructure that can come up immediately and be completely flexible in terms of how it's used, deployed, and managed. The other area that we're actually not focusing a lot of R&D on is console management. So one of the things that you'll see from a lot of our competitors is new consoles to help you manage all of your infrastructure. In fact, there's nothing our competitors would love more than having to choose their console to go manage the infrastructure that you have. We believe that it's much more practical, much more pragmatic to use the infrastructure you already use all the time, to use the consoles you already use all the time. So most of you use the consoles provided by your virtualization provider, like VMM. Better for you to -- for us to just hook into that rather than try to replace it with another console. There was an announcement just yesterday from a major vendor on a different console all together, and even a cool demo. But it's still a proprietary console, and that's not something that you want. You want to be -- you want something that's standard with what you already use. That's Dell's approach there in terms of platform integration. As I mentioned, we talked about that system that we bought that promises some of these things recently. It had 20 consoles that we had to go figure out. And they were so, you know, finicky that it was very difficult to get them all, you know, coherent. So that's the kind of thing that we want to avoid. And finally, we want to do what we call dynamic IT, which is to actually be able to deliver IT in a fashion that promotes self-service, that promotes the ability to monitor and dynamically adjust your processes based on the application load and demand. So all of these things are initiatives that we are working on, but the key difference in how we are doing it, and our competition, is really in this whole idea of open and pragmatic. This is a kind of stack that a lot of companies, a lot people in this room, and a lot of companies can draw. It's not -- you know, no one has a Monopoly on a good idea. As we say, you know, visions are a dime a dozen. The question is how do you make sure that this is something that's open and pragmatic. And that's the challenge that I would like you guys to give to pretty much any vendor who talks to you about a vision like this. Is it open? Will it work with what I already have? Do I have to go out and buy a proprietary infrastructure? How hard is it to manage? Do I need to learn new consoles? Do I need to learn new tools? Those are the kind of questions you need to be asking from this.

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