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http://www.dell.co.uk

BRACKNELL, UK, April 14, 2011 – Small and medium businesses today are deluged with data that is overwhelming their existing technology infrastructures.  To help these growing businesses thrive in the “Virtual Era” where multi-media content, multiple access points and devices are the norm, Dell today introduced new server, storage and networking offerings.

First Server —Dell’s PowerEdge T110 II and R210 II

Dell today introduced a guide to servers made easy – a roadmap for entrepreneurs as they contemplate purchasing either their first server or expanding their IT infrastructure with new servers.  In addition to online resources, Dell is introducing refreshed value servers with the right balance of performance, flexible features and business value to meet the needs of small to midsized businesses and branch offices – the entry-level PowerEdge T110 II and mid-level PowerEdge R210 II.

Both have the performance and features to run business applications that facilitate data coordination and sharing, protection, management and scalability to support business growth with features such as choice of processors to meet performance needs with new Intel® Xeon® processor E3-1200 product family, the Intel® Core™ i3-2100 product family and Intel® Pentium® processors, 4 DIMM slots with enough memory to handle common applications and the full Dell OpenManage suite of systems management for ease of maintenance.

Storage Within Reach – The PowerVault NX3500 / MD3600i

According to IDC, the capacity of storage systems shipped in the fourth quarter of 2010 grew more than 55 percent from a year earlier with demand for bytes growing even during the recession.¹ With this data explosion in mind, Dell today unveiled two new storage offerings that help customers reduce complexity and increase the availability of their data to help their businesses run smarter.

The PowerVault NX3500, featuring the Dell Scalable File System, provides affordable scale-up Network Attached Storage (NAS) functionality for smaller scale, high availability deployments. The system works with PowerVault MD32x0i and MD36x0i storage arrays to help provide affordable unified storage with iSCSI, CIFS and NFS access to block and file data. With no architectural limits to file-system size, it is designed to give customers more flexibility than traditional unified storage. Integrating next-generation high performance, highly optimized file system technology from Exanet, Dell Scalable File System, delivers the first unified storage solution in Dell’s PowerVault iSCSI storage array product series. The NX3500 also offers affordable data protection features, including snapshots, replication and NDMP backup support.

The PowerVault MD3600i is an Ethernet-based (10GbE) storage device that is designed to deliver exceptional storage capacity to small and midsize businesses without sacrificing performance or flexibility. With an intuitive multi-generational management interface the MD3600i can be installed in under 30 minutes. Growing businesses with limited technical and financial resources can keep up with data growth, Web and media demands while reducing server sprawl by virtualizing infrastructure applications. The system also provides medium-sized businesses with remote offices a cost-effective way to support virtualized infrastructures leveraging 10GbE Ethernet to improve limited or slow data migration between home and remote office locations. Lastly, the MD3600i continues to maintain the uncompromising value of being able to share common components with our PowerEdge server line (i.e. hard drives) expediting installation and deployments for our SMB customers.

Networking

To help supplement Dell’s new server and storage offerings, the company recently launched new 5500 and 7000 PowerConnect switch families to enable technology infrastructures where scalability, flexibility and value are key requirements. Both families implement innovative technology features to streamline deployment, simplify management and help reduce operating costs with power-saving Energy Efficient Ethernet (IEEE 802.3az) design and Power-over-Ethernet operation.

The PowerConnect 7000 family is designed to deliver scalable performance and enhanced functionality for midsized business deployments, distributed offices and large server farms. Businesses benefit from high availability wire-speed performance and simplified management of multiple switches with a single IP address, enabling them to power business applications while maintaining flexibility and control of the network. The 7000 series delivers the connectivity to support the new PowerEdge R210 servers in addition to seamless, automated provisioning and iSCSI operation with Dell’s EqualLogic storage arrays.

The PowerConnect 5500 series enables a superb solution to basic, non-managed Gigabit Ethernet switches deployed in small-to-medium offices and remote locations, which require rapid wire-speed deployment with flexible features. Efficient energy operation and simplified switch configuration can reduce operating costs while providing customers cost-effective performance they need to scale with their growing business needs.

Anything the vendors can do to improve the accessibility to platforms such as virtualization or the ability to deploy new technologies to empower their business has to be a good thing. Making the technology more accessible not only in terms of finance but in operations, in management and support remains key to on boarding new customers, not only for businesses themselves but the vendor and their eco-systems alike, the service providers and partners. The more we on board the small businesses, the more range of opportunities for revenue generation we create, the more different end user requirements we come across remembering that an issue affecting one small business could equally be of value to the next enterprise we encounter albeit in possibly a different footprint or package. Great news from Dell, I’m off to read up more, particularly about their storage and networking solutions as well as their servers.

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