"A lot of people have tried doing [SDN] but have not succeeded with a full stack. That is what's different about us," Joshipura said.
Dell also noted its growing strength in the 10 Gbit Ethernet (GbE) and 40 GbE switching market, citing research last week from Dell'Oro Group saying that, in the fourth quarter of 2011, Dell was the share leader in the 40-GbE market, ahead of IBM and Extreme Networks, and No. 3 in the 10GbE market, behind Cisco and HP. While 1 GbE is the most widely used capacity switch, 10 GbE is gaining traction of late as network capacity demands grow. The 40-GbE standard is on the horizon but is most likely to be deployed at the network core rather than on the network edge, explained Tam Dell'Oro, founder, president and senior analyst at the research firm that studies the networking space.
"Dell has been very innovative at trying to allow flexibility at the customer end on the server side so that folks can do combo cards--a combination of 1 Gig and 10 Gig--because the price of 10 Gig when you look at it is still pretty expensive, and 40 Gig in the network core is just rolling out now," Dell'Oro said. She advised customers not to invest in 10 GbE on the network edge unless and until they have already installed 40-GbE capacity switches in their network core.
The server introductions drew the interest of James Stock, assistant VP of network services at Grow Financial, a federal credit union based in Tampa, Fla., that uses a mix of Dell storage, servers and networking equipment (as well as Cisco equipment in its data center). Stock, who appeared on a customer panel at the Monday event, said he was prepared to replace older Dell 2950 series servers with PowerEdge 9 series hardware, but was impressed with the coming PowerEdge M620, which he believes will provide better performance than what he has now but for less money than the PowerEdge 9.
Stock said one thing he notices about Dell is that when it acquires companies, it takes their technology and invests in it to make better products. "That's something I really find attractive with Dell--that everything they buy they try to incorporate it wherever they can," he said.
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