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Dell on Wednesday said it would offer pre-configured systems for enterprise customers looking to get server environments up and running quickly.

The fixed configurations include servers, storage modules and software that are pretested and can be deployed in hours, Dell officials said. The offerings are a diversification from Dell’s traditional built-to-order business model, in which customers typically specify configurations before ordering.

Dell is offering fixed systems as an option to custom-built systems that could take longer to configure and deploy, said Praveen Asthana, Dell’s director of enterprise storage.

“The goal is speed,” Asthana said. “Now we’re saying you can be up and running in 30 minutes, not in a week.”

The systems are targeted at customers like small- and- medium businesses who may lack expertise in server deployment, or to those who want to quickly deploy servers with applications like virtualization.

I can certainly see the appeal of this, having pre-defined configurations aimed with specific markets or uses can aid the sales process and improve Dell’s ability to ship out systems more quickly, anything we can do to aid the end user community in ordering the right technologies, in making the technology more affordable and accessible has to be a good thing.

Interestingly this was something that I was speaking with at an enterprise in the city, which had taken to consolidate the range of servers they bought, reducing the I’ll have one of these to a very simple, small/medium and large configuration, (anything else was then looked at on a per project basis).

Small might be:

• 2 processors
• 8GB RAM
• 4×300GB drives

Medium might be:

• 4 socket processors
• 16GB RAM
• 2x 300GB drives and SAN storage

Large might be:

• 4 socket or 8 socket processors
• 32-64GB RAM
• 2x 300gb drives and SAN storage

By doing this, the company was able to negotiate more standardized (stable) prices through their purchase arrangements, reduce the time it took to get a server shipped, and reduce the different types of x86 servers, from 16 to 3, significantly reducing their support cost, driver and firmware management activities, as well as knowledge that the engineers had to have per platform. More crucially it met the majority of end user requests, people understood the concept immediately, and it allowed IT to choose the configurations more easily without debate, making the process more binary, the debate moved on from drive capacity, server models to whether I needed two sockets or four, whether I needed SAN storage or not. Interestingly the same concept is being tried in their virtual configurations next month.

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