On March 24th, 2010, Dell stepped up to the plate in the virtual era solutions ball game and hit a home run with their announcements and positioning of new products and services offerings. The company was well prepared and came laced up and ready to play at the Bently Reserve in San Francisco where they made their announcements and provided a partner roundtable discussion that demonstrated support for the new Dell products and solutions. In the health care space, Dell announced the new Dell Medical Archiving Solution, which includes a new high-performance computing PowerEdge server along with object storage, connectivity and deployment support via partners and implementation support via Dell Perot services.
From the server perspective, Dell announced the new PowerEdge C6100, which is geared specifically for HPC, Web 2.0 and gaming environments and for high-density computing that consumes less energy overall. They also discussed support for a QLogic Pass-Through module that connects to the blade server's InfiniBand mezzanine card and then externally to any industry-standard InifiBand switch. The Pass-Through module enables lower power consumption at the blade level, compared to installing an energy-inefficient InfiniBand switch card into the blade severs.
Recognizing the unique storage requirements for the medical imaging demands within health care today, Dell has developed and announced the new DX Object Storage Platform. I spent some time speaking with Dell's Darren Thomas, General Manger of Storage Business, and he explained that the DX consists of a Dell sever and OS designed for medical image object storage. Darren explained that the DX is built upon advanced PCI architecture and will support massive storage scale-out. The system strives to be green by spinning down disk drives as it determines usage on specific disks. (For disk drives that have been turned off, these drives will be turned on, spun up, and every object will be checked for data integrity on a weekly basis)
There is no doubt that Dell is serious, ready and committed to moving forward in the Health Care space. Clearly, the company views the explosion of content within medical imaging as a prime business opportunity, and in my opinion, users in this market should give serious consideration to the new Medical Archiving Solutions. Don't forget to ask for references.
Also on the 24th, Dell announced that it has expanded its OEM relationship with EMC and will OEM the EMC Data Domain deduplication products and NS Series Unified NAS/SAN supporting storage line. The Dell Data Domain series consists of models DD140, DD610 and DD630. The NS series includes the EMC line up of NS-120, NS-480, and NS960. Dell has smartly included the small to large dedupe and multi-protocol NAS/SAN storage solutions in its product portfolio as it moves forward in its efforts to tackle internal and external cloud compute and storage requirements. All the OEM EMC products will be Dell-branded and carry the Dell logo plates on the product. This indicates that Dell is focused on supplying products with proven market acceptance and that can assist Dell in delivering turn-key solutions.
