Issues

Computing ageing well under Dell

With over 30 years experience Dell are evolving to continue being a leader in technology solutions for future generations.

john-mccloskey

John McCloskey, Enterprise Solutions Director Dell Ireland

For more than 30 years, Dell has played a critical role in transforming computing, enabling more affordable and more pervasive access to technology around the world. Today, Dell offers technology solutions for every person at every age and in every profession, from the four year-old starting school to a data centre systems administrator to the CIO of a global corporation:

  • 98 per cent of global Fortune 500 companies
  • Millions of small and medium businesses
  • More than 10,000 schools, 295,000 classrooms worldwide; millions of students globally
  • Every G20 government
  • 400,000 physicians and 4,000 hospitals
  • 167,000 channel partners globally
  • 60,000 retail locations
  • Millions of consumer customers

The IT industry is at a critical inflection point that will redefine the types of products and services customers demand from their technology providers, including greater mobility, virtualization, cloud computing and ubiquitous data capacity and access. In recent years, Dell has emerged as a new company. We have our strongest-ever product and services portfolio, we have acquired significant new skills and capabilities, reorganized our operations, optimized our global supply chain and put a world-class management team in place, all to provide solutions with the best value, ease of use and flexibility. The combination of Dell and EMC provides unmatched ability to address large and small customers’ rapidly changing critical IT needs. Dell Technologies will create more customer value by pursuing a persistent strategy that leverages combined expertise and innovations, while prioritising investment in the most strategic areas of technology. A more comprehensive portfolio with unmatched strength in the fastest-growing areas of next-generation IT: digital transformation, software-defined data centre, hybrid cloud, converged infrastructure, hyper-converged infrastructure, mobile and security. In fact, Dell and EMC currently hold leadership positions in 21 Magic Quadrants. Unrivalled expertise to help our customers’ business grow, from large enterprise customers to mid-sized and small markets. The combined power of Dell Technologies will deliver unparalleled choice, scale and flexibility to achieve their business goals.

The Hybrid Cloud: Your Cloud, Your Way

claire-vyvyan

Claire Vyvyan, Vice President – Enterprise Solutions Group at Dell

Cloud computing has become a significant topic of conversation in the technology industry and is being seen as a key delivery mechanism for enabling IT services. Today’s reality is that most organisations already are using some form of cloud because it opens up new opportunities and has become engrained in the fabric of how things are done and how business outcomes are achieved.

Cloud offers a host of service and deployment models: both on- and off-premises, across public, private, and managed clouds. We see some organisations starting with public cloud because of the perceived ease of entry and lower costs. Some organisations are using cloud for their application test and development groups, because it’s easier and quicker in some organisations for standing up the infrastructure than building an in-house test and development environment. Other companies use public clouds because they simply don’t have the resources to build, own and manage a private cloud infrastructure today or because they prefer to use their IT resources in different ways. However we are seeing more and more companies building private cloud architectures, which are becoming much easier and quicker to deploy but still come with IT control and piece-of-mind security benefits.

That said, every organisation’s cloud is a unique reflection of its business strategies, priorities and needs. This is why there is such great variation in how companies go about implementing their own specific IT needs and in most business over time we expect to see a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy developing.

The Cloud Journey

No matter where the journey begins, one of the first realisations is that there is no one particular solution or answer to how to best utilise cloud solutions. The journey typically evolves over time and requires multiple clouds with a combination of both public, private and possibly managed clouds – resulting in a hybrid cloud end-state.

Before deciding on a cloud approach, it is important to understand all of the possibilities that cloud technologies provide, and agree on business initiatives, priorities, and desired results required to support your business needs and intended outcomes. The decision should not focus entirely on which type of cloud to deploy, private, public, managed or hybrid, but rather focus on delivering the right environment, at the right cost, with the right characteristics (i.e. agility, cost, compliance, security) to achieve your business objectives.

When evaluating cloud options, look for solutions that enable the following business benefits:

  • Faster Innovation: Does this cloud provide new ways to deliver faster value to customers in current and new markets?
  • More Agility: Does this approach provide a more flexible, modular way to meet ever-changing customer needs and scale up or down as needed, quickly and efficiently?
  • Increased Return on Investment (ROI): How will this cloud generate increased value to end customers? How will it help optimise existing technologies and lower long-term total cost of ownership (TCO)?
  • Range of Choice: Does this cloud enable customised workloads? How does it address compliance and security concerns?
  • More Simplicity: Will this cloud simplify or complicate the IT environment? How will it be managed?

Chances are that using more than one type of cloud will best enable delivery of these benefits.

Additionally, consider which platform will provide the optimal business results for a given workload. With hybrid cloud, multiple workloads could run across multiple cloud platforms. As demands on workloads ebb and flow (i.e. a major event or opportunity that causes a usage spike in your web or IT requirements), those workloads can take advantage of more than one cloud platform with options typically chosen based on the most cost-effective and reliable options at any given time. Evidence of this can be seen as some workloads originally hosted in a public cloud environment are now moving back into the fold of internally-managed IT, a trend recognised as cloud repatriation.

Repatriation represents a real and outstanding value proposition in terms of efficiency, value, and how to successfully manage a cloud journey, while still gaining quick results and doing what is best for the overall organisation. More importantly, it points the way to where cloud, or all of IT, is going. It has shifted the debate from “public or private cloud” to, “when and how fast” a company will reach a hybrid cloud end-state that truly reflects its needs and the best of the service and support it is employing.

Taking the discussion one step further, beyond repatriation and hybrid cloud, organisations will start looking not only at a hybrid cloud end-state, but a multi-cloud strategy. Businesses will have the ability for on premise support and use of a public cloud provider, and they also will be able to choose to have multiple public cloud providers, the Amazons, the Azures, the Googles of the world, to help achieve their desired business outcomes.

Ultimately, there are multiple factors that go into deciding which cloud solutions or platforms will enable the best business results from a given workload. One choice does not fit all. A hybrid cloud strategy represents being able to extract the benefits from multiple cloud platforms and “rightsizing” the workloads for your organisation. At the end of the day, that is what is going to impact how your infrastructure helps achieve business outcomes.

Establishing future-ready networks that deliver change

paul-arts

Paul Arts, EMEA Networking Marketing Lead, Dell

Those managing enterprise networks often face significant pressure from the wider business, particularly within large organisations and data centres that are determined to improve the user experience and increase operational efficiency.

Legacy networks are often the root of common issues when managing networking operations. These challenges include increased security concerns as outdated architectures and programming increase the risk of attack, while failing performance due to ageing hardware creates limitations in terms of management options. Historically, the lack of innovative new technologies available on the market has also led to businesses continuing with sub-optimal network performance. This has resulted in an environment ripe for disruption from open standards based networking, where hardware and software are decoupled and the use of open source software provides additional flexibility. Whilst many businesses are exploring these options and beginning to address their networking issues, the adoption of software defined networking (SDN) and virtualization to enable smarter, faster networks is still very slow.

The initial signs of disruption within the enterprise networking sector are now well established, as businesses are visibly switching to automated processing, but this may not be enough. While larger organisations are leading the way, many smaller enterprises are struggling to implement these new technologies, with the cost of available networking solutions regularly cited as one of the key barriers.

In addition, according to IDC and Dell’s recent Networks That Deliver Change whitepaper, management in smaller companies tends to regard technology expenditures simply as a cost centre and often fails to identify the strategic, enabling role of the IT department. This has a pronounced effect on the adoption of new technologies, with up to 34 per cent* of business leaders waiting for solutions to be proven in the market before embarking upon an implementation of their own. As a result, despite virtualization having firmly established itself in mainstream business applications, the networking side can be seen to be lagging behind core operations.

This is not the only problem however, as IDC has identified a potentially greater issue surrounding the lack of understanding and experience in implementing and managing SDN within enterprise environments. The study revealed that of the responding organisations, only a fifth* had practical experience with SDN and of those, only one percent actually use the platform extensively. This reflects part of a broader industry issue, where organisations lack enough skilled and certified staff to manage modern network infrastructures, creating additional barriers to adopting new technologies. What this means is that businesses are in considerable danger of missing out on the strategic benefits offered by emerging networking solutions. This can, in turn, prevent the realisation of significant increases to the bottom line performance and therefore exposes a potential weakness in today’s competitive marketplace.

There is still hope, as many businesses can compensate for having fewer qualified virtualization engineers by sharing this limited skill set across each division of its IT team, spanning the server, storage and networking teams. The data from the study indicated that a significant proportion of businesses keep their networking teams separate from their server and storage teams – where a considerable amount of the existing experience around virtualization implementation and management lies. By bringing the networking and wider operations teams together, it’s possible to increase the overall expertise and management capability of each department, compensating for the lack of certification specifically contained within the networking team. Whilst the businesses themselves can resolve this by moving away from a “siloed” approach, there remains an additional stumbling block relating to the usage of fragmented management tools and independent operational practices, as outlined in the IDC whitepaper.

According to the data only three per cent of participants indicated that they used integrated end-to-end service management suites for IT infrastructure, DC networks and campus networks. This hinders the realisation of automation within networking management and creates additional obstacles for network engineers and IT professionals.

This is where vendors must begin to take responsibility. Only by working alongside partners and customers can they bolster the capabilities of enterprise networks. By providing advanced services and encouraging integrated systems management, vendors can accelerate the adoption of advanced networking technologies, allowing for increased automation and the establishment of future ready networking infrastructure.

Web: marketing.dell.com/uk/networking-idc

For more information contact Gavin_McCarthy@dell.com or visit www.dell.ie

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