Building the Efficient Data Center

By Bryan Jones and Bill Goins

Imagine a data center where pooled servers, networking, and storage can be rapidly redeployed to meet changing needs; where business application developers can self-provision their workload deployments; and where optimized storage and intelligent infrastructure are the norm. Dell is moving well beyond industry expectations to unlock data center efficiency and help organizations work toward the goal of returning as much as 50 percent of their IT budgets.

Today, efficiency is a basic tenet of business survival. The boardroom IT conversation is no longer restricted to cutting costs—it’s about investing in technology to efficiently drive business and organizational success.

Although IT supports virtually every business process, and tough economic times have led to intensified competition, many organizations are hard-pressed to take advantage of technology advances when they are trapped into spending most of a spartan IT budget on maintenance instead of innovation. As a result, nonstrategic tasks are occupying an increasing proportion of the workday in many data centers.

Virtualization and consolidation can go a long way toward driving data center efficiency, but they are just the beginning. Technologies for flexible data management, self-service workload creation and deployment, resource pooling, and smart, self-aware infrastructure help to simplify data center management and significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO). In an environment where IT leaders are looking to partner with business units in a way that increases automation and productivity across the organization, advanced data center technologies can make these goals a reality.

Most technology vendors are focused on tackling the simplest of these challenges by virtualizing, consolidating, and automating the data center. These vendors typically propose a collection of proprietary offerings designed to lock organizations into vertically integrated, premium-priced infrastructures.

Dell offers a model for tackling these challenges and building a solid foundation for enterprise efficiency that does not lock organizations into proprietary solutions—a model that can optimize the existing data center, maintain choice in vendors and technology, and allow incremental implementation as time and budget allow. The Efficient Data Center is a key component of Dell’s Efficient Enterprise model, purpose-built to lower costs and increase IT efficiency.

Best Practices: Envisioning the Efficient Data Center

In the Dell Efficient Enterprise vision, technology infrastructures are open, capable, and affordable. Products and services for the data center are flexible and avoid locking organizations into using a single vendor or proprietary technologies that contribute to increased TCO and limit future choice; products and services have innovative functionality that meets existing requirements and provides the flexibility to adapt to future requirements. In addition, Dell’s vision blends new technology with existing infrastructure, existing expertise, and industry-standard approaches designed to drive down TCO and complexity.

Dell begins with a three-step approach to help organizations unlock enterprise efficiency and achieve significant returns on their IT investment. The first step on the journey is to optimize the existing data center infrastructure, with the goal of achieving uniformity and cutting costs. Common platforms, standards-based tools, and unified fabrics can contribute to these efforts. The goal: to eliminate proprietary legacy architectures, like RISC- and SPARC-based UNIX® systems, and replace them with a scaled x86 architecture running Microsoft® Windows® or Linux® operating systems to help lower costs and reduce management oversight.

The next step is to simplify the technology infrastructure. Using pragmatic approaches such as virtualization and storage consolidation, organizations can consolidate or unify redundancies to help ensure that they are getting the most out of their data center resources. Rationalizing and reducing the number of applications also enhances the flexibility to easily remove and repurpose servers.

After the data center has been standardized and simplified, enhanced levels of automation become possible. The third step is to implement best practices that help reduce manual intervention and boost productivity, together with cloud-based delivery models (where appropriate) that help reduce administrative burdens on IT staff and enhance application availability. Managed service options also allow organizations to combine 24/7 monitoring, alerts, and reporting with expert analysis and advice.

Four Pillars: Building the Efficient Data Center

In the Dell model, the Efficient Data Center is built on four key pillars (see Figure 1):

• Intelligent infrastructure: Deploys servers, networking, and fabrics that are designed and purpose-built to help reduce acquisition and operating costs, with the goals of reducing the number and types of devices to manage, racking and cabling once, taking advantage of the 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) convergence, and maintaining the flexibility of a multi-vendor approach
• Simplified infrastructure management: Includes technologies that enable IT staff to consolidate tools and pool resources, helping them to increase the operating efficiency of both new and existing infrastructures and to dynamically redeploy assets as conditions change
• Streamlined application and workload management: Includes tools that allow rapid delivery of strategic IT services with the goals of enabling application developers to easily create images and self-provision their workload deployments, automating approval and deployment processes, and providing self-service cataloged services and chargebacks
• Dell Intelligent Data Management: Optimizes content storage throughout its life cycle by automatically placing it on the appropriate tier and storage type while optimizing storage for virtualized environments

 

 

Intelligent Infrastructure

Dell’s Efficient Data Center approach can help organizations optimize their existing data centers, virtualize on their own schedule, take advantage of cloud technologies as they make business sense—and prepare their data centers for the future.

Achieving these goals requires advanced servers, networking equipment, and storage. Intelligent infrastructure is designed to automate frequent tasks to drive down TCO, rapidly respond to change requests, and help administrators anticipate issues and proactively respond. Dell offers a range of infrastructure products to help meet these needs. Purpose-built hardware, like Dell™ PowerEdge™ C-Series servers optimized for cloud applications, can help administrators accomplish specific tasks. An efficient fabric helps lower costs and allows administrators to rack and cable only once. Cloud services enable applications to be cloud optimized. Intelligent infrastructure helps optimize the data center today and build the foundation for advanced Efficient Data Center services.

Dell gears its approach to enterprise efficiency toward taking advantage of the hardware and software already in the data center while also incorporating purpose-built hardware. With the right mix of blade servers, rack servers, towers, and custom form factors, IT departments can achieve optimum levels of compute density, memory, and I/O to help meet specific enterprise needs.

Dell PowerEdge servers are designed to support generalized workloads, hardware-based availability, and a traditional break/fix service model. PowerEdge C-Series servers are standardized and purpose-built for cloud applications. And Dell Data Center Solutions (DCS) are designed to support the largest public cloud providers in the industry with specialized workloads, application-based availability, and custom service models.

10GbE connectivity is rapidly becoming the industry standard for networking in the data center. Enterprises can leverage this convergence to help reduce operating costs and avoid complexity while continuing to extract value from existing investments. Because the 10GbE standard allows organizations to continue using their existing platforms and networking tools, they can extend capital investments and IT staff training to the updated infrastructure. 10GbE bandwidth also allows the reduction of port count to help reduce cost, while a multi-vendor approach helps preserve choice in adopting new technologies as they become available.

Key Dell connectivity offerings include Dell PowerConnect™ switches, which provide Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and 10GbE rack and blade switches that can deliver extreme price/performance targeted for edge network applications. Dell PowerConnect B-Series switches offer GbE and 10GbE rack and chassis switches for price-sensitive aggregation, core, and storage area network (SAN) applications, while other upcoming Dell PowerConnect switches are expected to facilitate performance-oriented switching for wide area networking and networking security applications.

The Dell Lifecycle Controller, delivered as part of the Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC) Express in 11th-generation Dell PowerEdge servers, embeds systems management features directly in the server—helping avoid media-based delivery of systems management tools and utilities. This delivery model helps simplify provisioning, deployment, patching and updates, servicing, and user customization. It also helps reduce the time required to accomplish common tasks, reduce the potential for error, enhance security, and contribute to increasingly efficient management.

Simplified Infrastructure Management

Managing servers, networks, and storage as a common pool enables these resources to be rapidly redeployed to help meet dynamically changing needs. Dell’s Efficient Data Center approach consolidates, streamlines, and automates the management of data center resources to bring virtual-like functionality to physical servers, help eliminate unnecessary management consoles, and dynamically reprovision servers. Advanced Dell systems can help administrators to efficiently operate heterogeneous data centers—enabling them to rack and cable once, and then redeploy when needed.

Instead of replacing heterogeneous technology infrastructures with single-vendor platforms, Dell focuses on providing comprehensive, streamlined support for the range of platforms already at work in enterprise data centers (see Figure 2). This approach—which accommodates dynamic management of mixed technology environments, including platforms from Microsoft, VMware, Citrix, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun, in addition to Dell hardware—helps to deliver dynamic workload flexibility, enable automated deployment, and support highly efficient operations management.

Dell offers a range of technologies designed to simplify systems management. Dell Advanced Infrastructure Manager software allows IT departments to manage networking, storage, and servers—both physical and virtual—as a single resource pool. This approach helps avoid resource silos, allowing organizations to allocate resources dynamically to meet changing workload demands. In addition, IT managers can seamlessly migrate workloads between physical and virtual environments to help organizations meet virtualization goals and extend the use of virtualization technology in the enterprise while also avoiding duplicate tools and processes.

Dell Management Console powered by Altiris™ from Symantec™ provides a single comprehensive view into an organization’s IT infrastructure to help reduce the management complexity traditionally associated with data center infrastructure. IT managers can use this tool to monitor the health of key systems or system subcomponents, and perform basic provisioning, discovery, inventory, power control, and alerting tasks.

Streamlined Application and Workload Management

Advanced, application-aware workload and service monitoring as well as on-demand monitoring of underlying physical and virtual platforms can help dramatically reduce administrative burdens on IT staff—freeing them to focus on strategic projects that add value by advancing business goals and organizational objectives. In addition, by automating and standardizing the way IT resources are deployed, organizations can reduce the time and manual intervention required to allocate resources to applications. Tiered infrastructure offerings further help to create uniformity and facilitate cost containment and chargebacks.

In the Dell vision of the Efficient Data Center, enterprises can rapidly deliver strategic IT services with new capabilities. The Dell road map includes a range of application and workload management functionality— including drag-and-drop image creation, self-service workload deployment, and advanced monitoring capabilities.

Intelligent Data Management

By automating management of data through predictable, scalable, and open data storage, enterprises can move toward maximizing the value of their data. Automatically deduplicating and storing content on the appropriate tier and storage type can help control data storage costs while providing almost limitless storage capacity scaling.

Strategies for Intelligent Data Management can include the following:

• Storage tiers: Enterprises reduce storage costs by using tiered storage infrastructures—matching data value with storage platform cost. Intelligent tiering alone can cut storage costs by 50 percent.
• Object storage: Policy-based deduplication, archiving, and search of structured and unstructured data help reduce storage costs by automating time-consuming manual tasks.
• Virtualization optimization: Storage arrays that are optimized for virtual environments help reduce costs and complexity.
• Open standards: Leveraging Fibre Channel and Internet SCSI (iSCSI) over 10GbE helps reduce fabric complexity, streamline maintenance, and simplify cabling configurations.

Dell offers support for Intelligent Data Management through Dell EqualLogic™ PS Series iSCSI SAN arrays, which are optimized for virtualized environments. Dell PowerVault™ tape drives offer simplified storage solutions for branch office or cost-sensitive applications. And Dell/EMC SAN arrays offer highly scalable, flexible networked storage aimed at Fibre Channel–based storage applications. Dell has also recently announced new object-based storage systems with the Dell DX Object Storage Platform, which uses a self-managing peer-scaling architecture to enable organizations to access, store, and distribute billions of files or other digital content, from archiving all the way to the cloud.

A New Focus: Transforming Enterprise Efficiency

Efficiency has become a basic tenet of business survival, and the relentless drive to increase efficiency is leading to a widespread transformation of the IT infrastructure. While executives are searching for the best way to increase efficiency and, in turn, competitive advantage, the largest share of many technology budgets is still going to fixed expenses that maintain the status quo. Technologies like virtualization offer many benefits, but they also create complexity when the proposed solution is a collection of proprietary offerings that restrict organizations with vertically integrated, premium-priced toolkits.

The Dell Efficient Data Center model is designed to go beyond the efficiency basics of standardization, simplification, and automation to help unlock the business value of enterprise IT investments. By implementing the four key pillars of the Efficient Data Center—intelligent infrastructure, simplified infrastructure management, streamlined application and workload management, and Intelligent Data Management—organizations can create an open, capable, affordable approach to infrastructure designed to increase flexibility, reduce costs, and shift the focus to how IT can help meet strategic enterprise goals now and in the future.

• The Efficient Enterprise: DELL.COM/EfficientEnterprise
• The Efficient Data Center: DELL.COM/EfficientDataCenter

Capitalizing on Microsoft Windows 7 Mobility Features for Secure Remote Access

As legions of mobile workers connect to their organizations’ internal networks, IT leaders must find ways to enhance efficiency and simplify management of remote systems. Recent innovations in Dell^™ client solutions and the Microsoft® Windows® 7 OS enable faster, easier mobile access to networks than ever before—helping to reduce total cost of ownership and increase remote client stability.

A widespread and growing mobile workforce is expanding the scope of traditional IT infrastructures. As the borderless office model becomes increasingly prevalent, many organizations face growing demands to enhance their support for geographically dispersed workers and remote employees, who require secure, easy-to-use mechanisms that enable remote access to internal networks.

For IT managers, supporting this remote and mobile workforce means addressing multiple challenges. In addition to secure network access for a variety of mobile devices, users look to their IT departments to provide a seamless, high-quality computing experience that fosters productivity in the field as well as in the office. At the same time, organizations are looking for ways to enhance the stability of the mobile computing infrastructure and reduce IT management costs associated with growing mobility.

Running Microsoft Windows 7 on Dell Latitude^™ laptops and Dell Precision^™ mobile workstations helps organizations to meet these challenges by taking advantage of the latest performance, manageability, and productivity advances for client systems. Dell worked extensively with Microsoft to build many common device drivers directly into the Windows 7 kernel.

Managing remote systems effectively

Dell offers a variety of leading technologies to help simplify remote management while reducing total cost of ownership. Simplified management starts with the built-in hardware monitoring and configuration capabilities that form the core of Dell client management instrumentation and utilities.

Running on top of this built-in Dell instrumentation, the Dell Management Console Powered by Altiris^™ from Symantec^™ offers a “single pane of glass” view of IT infrastructure and enables administrators to add clients, configure or update the BIOSs of multiple systems simultaneously, monitor system health, and deliver basic provisioning. The Intel® vPro^™ technology available in many Dell clients enables out-of-band management as well.

Windows 7 enhances these capabilities with a variety of remote management features. For example, Windows 7 helps strengthen manageability by allowing IT administrators to service remote systems on a regular basis and help ensure that mobile systems stay up-to-date with organizational policies. With the DirectAccess feature in Windows 7, IT administrators can manage mobile systems by updating Group Policy settings and distributing software updates whenever the mobile system has Internet connectivity, even if the user is not logged on to the network.

Safeguarding remote client stability can be simple and effective with the Windows 7 AppLocker^™ feature. When users download unauthorized software, they can inadvertently introduce application conflicts and malware. AppLocker allows IT administrators to specify which applications and versions may be installed. Administrators can manage an application regardless of whether it is accessed internally from a local area network (LAN) or externally from either a wide area network (WAN) or the Internet. This feature helps simplify IT by giving administrators a single tool and interface to manage applications and by helping reduce the number of application versions they need to manage.

Windows 7 also helps accelerate problem resolution. When problems arise with a remote client, the Problem Steps Recorder tool in Windows 7 expedites the support process. This tool documents the steps needed for resolution by capturing screen shots of the desktop and additional details about the user interface elements and OS.

Providing fast, easy network access

Capabilities in Dell client systems together with Windows 7 help simplify and accelerate the user experience compared with previous versions of Windows. For example, single-click access to networks and plug-and-play connections with 3G mobile cards help advance user efficiency.

With Windows 7 running on Dell laptops, the process of pulling up a mobile broadband application, making a connection, and accessing a virtual private network (VPN) is designed to be significantly faster than on systems running the Windows XP or Windows Vista® OS. Windows 7 provides a single interface designed to display available networks and make the strongest connection, whether that is through Wi-Fi® or broadband connectivity (see Figure 1). Also, the Windows 7 DirectAccess feature helps to free users from loading and activating a VPN, because this step is integrated into the remote access connection process.

Figure 1. A single Windows 7 interface displaying available Wi-Fi and broadband networks

Helping to further simplify remote access, the Microsoft mobile broadband utility includes integrated drivers for broadband cards from various providers. Instead of loading the software from a card provider and then hoping it is compatible with the client OS and hardware, users can rely on built-in compatibility. Windows 7 can recognize the card type, automatically load the appropriate drivers already integrated within the OS, and provide a familiar Windows interface for users to customize settings.

Dell Latitude ON^™ connectivity technology contributes to fast access and user productivity by helping to reduce system startup time. Provided as an integrated module for Latitude E4200 and Latitude E4300 laptops, this technology is designed to give users near-instant access to calendars, e-mail, contacts, the Internet, and other frequently used applications. Well suited for mobile users who need to quickly check e-mail or appointments on the go, Dell Latitude ON enables bidirectional remote access to Microsoft Exchange data with the single touch of a button, without booting or waking the entire laptop.

Extending mobile platform battery life

With long-lasting battery life (up to 22.5 hours in select mainstream models¹), Dell Latitude laptops are designed to support all-day computing. Dell Latitude ON extends this battery life by conserving power when it bypasses a full system boot.

Windows 7 helps extend battery life as well. First, Windows 7 has a comparatively light processing footprint compared with the previous OS version. While the Microsoft Aero® interface offers an intuitive and aesthetically pleasing user experience, in Windows Vista it required intensive graphics processing that could slow system performance and drain battery power. Retooled Aero code in Windows 7 is less processor intensive than it was in Windows Vista, drawing less power and helping to extend the life of laptop batteries.

The display on a mobile PC typically consumes more battery power than any other part of the computer. Windows 7 addresses this factor by automatically reducing display brightness after a period of inactivity to help conserve power and prolong battery life. The feature intelligently adapts to user activity—for example, if the screen dims after 30 seconds and the user immediately moves the mouse to brighten the display, Windows 7 waits 60 seconds before dimming the display again.

Boosting user productivity

Besides helping save battery power, the lighter processing footprint for the Aero interface under Windows 7 also enhances user productivity compared with Windows Vista. Migrating an existing Dell client from Windows Vista to Windows 7 can boost performance and the responsiveness of business productivity applications running on the same hardware. In addition, users updating to Windows 7 may be less likely to require add-on graphics coprocessors to run demanding software such as design, digital editing, and computer-aided manufacturing applications.

A federated search feature in Windows 7 helps boost productivity by removing barriers to information. The feature is designed so that workers can access relevant information in remote network and Internet repositories through a simple user interface (see Figure 2). For example, users can configure the interface as a federation of selected Microsoft Office SharePoint® sites, data servers, and Internet sites and avoid sifting through volumes of stored data or trying to remember which SharePoint site contains a needed document. The feature is integrated with the Microsoft Internet Explorer® browser, and is standards based to enable it to work with other browsers as well.

Figure 2. Windows 7 federated search displaying information from multiple remote repositories within a single view

Fast connection of Windows 7 clients to projectors enables smooth, productive presentations on the road. The Windows 7 driver display utility helps make it easy to plug in a projector and display presentations without delay. A pop-up navigation window enables users to switch through multiple display settings, such as clone, extend, or external only. Also, users do not need to adjust the resolution because Windows 7 optimizes the projected image.

Using a keyboard and mouse is not always convenient for mobile users, and Windows 7 introduces support for multi-touch technology that can help reduce or avoid the need for these peripherals. Users can simply touch the screen to perform tasks such as scrolling, resizing windows, playing media, and panning and zooming images or pages. Workers can also browse the Web with Internet Explorer 8 and use a finger to scroll down a Web page. Using Windows Touch functionality requires a touch-screen monitor or laptop with a touch screen; selected Dell business systems, such as the Dell Latitude XT2 XFR, are ready to support Windows Touch out of the box.

Location-aware printing is another feature that helps save time and effort. Windows 7 allows users to designate several default printers in different locations, so there is no need to reset the default printer or remember the printer name. Windows 7 automatically switches the default printer for a laptop when it detects that the user has moved from one network location to another. Connecting to a new printer in a remote location can be simplified by virtue of having most drivers already built into the Windows 7 kernel.

Enhancing security for mobile devices

Several enhanced security capabilities supported by Dell and Microsoft help prevent unauthorized access and protect data in mobile systems. Enforcing user accounts to adopt a strong password is the first step in protecting access to Dell clients running Windows 7. For an additional layer of protection, especially in the field, selected Dell models come equipped with built-in biometric security in the form of a fingerprint scanner.

With Windows 7, Microsoft provides enhanced integration between the OS and fingerprint-scanning hardware, including enhanced driver support. Windows 7 includes a control panel that helps make it easy to enter user fingerprint data and configure fingerprint reading. Potential uses include identifying workers before allowing them to log on to Windows and authenticating users for other applications or Web site access.

Available with Windows Vista as well as Windows 7, BitLocker^™ drive encryption helps protect sensitive data from being accessed by unauthorized users who come into possession of lost or stolen laptops. The BitLocker To Go^™ feature extends BitLocker data protection to USB drives and other removable media, enabling them to be encrypted and restricted with a passphrase or smart card.

Dell also provides Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 1.2 hardware that can be used to implement BitLocker drive encryption. TPM provides integrity authentication to help ensure a trusted boot pathway. The key used for the drive encryption is sealed by the TPM chip. When a user attempts to access the drive, the key is released to the OS loader code only if the early boot files appear to be unmodified, helping ensure that only authorized users access the drive.

Streamlining mobile access with Windows 7

Organizations that deploy Dell Latitude laptops and Dell Precision mobile workstations for remote workers can optimize innovative mobility features in Microsoft Windows 7. Windows 7 introduces or enhances OS features that, together with capabilities built into Dell mobile computing platforms, can improve access, productivity, and security for mobile users.

These mobility features can also enhance manageability and reduce total cost of ownership of mobile platforms for IT managers. Dell Latitude laptops and Dell Precision mobile workstations are Windows ready and designed with advanced technology options that can fit the requirements of nearly any environment. Organizations can have Windows 7 factory installed by Dell when they refresh their mobile computing environments, or can migrate existing laptops to Windows 7 using Dell tools and services.

QUICK LINKS

Dell and Windows 7:

DELL.COM/Windows7Enterprise

Dell mobility solutions:

DELL.COM/Mobility

Dell Infrastructure Manager and the Virtualization-Ready Data Center

By Mahesh Natarajan

One of the biggest challenges facing IT organizations is the need to rapidly adapt their IT infrastructure to meet changing enterprise demands. Most data centers today are static—administrators determine a server’s function even before deploying it, and the server continues to deliver the same function regardless of usage patterns, utilization, or performance. Responding to hardware failures requires performing complex, time-consuming tasks across multiple areas of the infrastructure.

Dell Infrastructure Manager by Scalent (Dell IM) enables IT organizations to move beyond static designs toward a virtualization-ready data center providing an operational model for automating the infrastructure that allows change to be part of everyday activity. Using Dell IM, administrators can perform management tasks simply and efficiently, including rapidly provisioning physical servers and virtual machines (VMs), network connectivity, and storage access without manual intervention. As the foundation for a truly dynamic data center, Dell IM enables change to be the norm, not the exception, helping the IT infrastructure rapidly adjust to meet evolving enterprise needs.

Introducing Dell Infrastructure Manager

Dell IM is an infrastructure management and provisioning software solution that operates in the “control plane” of the data center. It interfaces with IT hardware or software using management application programming interfaces (APIs) supplied and supported by their respective vendors. This approach helps to unify control over heterogeneous infrastructure elements and offers multiple other advantages, including the following:

Increased responsiveness: Dell IM helps the data center react quickly to change and helps reduce the time to fulfill IT service requests. Because time to market is critical for many business applications, this responsiveness can make substantial contributions to both the top and bottom lines.

• Reduced capital expenditures: Dell IM helps eliminate the need to deploy and maintain dedicated spare servers. Instead, it allows the creation of a shared pool of spare servers, one of which is automatically provisioned in the event a running server fails.
• Increased productivity: Automated end-to-end provisioning helps simplify and accelerate common data center tasks, including new server deployment, recovery from server failure, and change management—helping significantly increase IT staff productivity across the data center.

Creating a virtualization-ready data center

The key enabling technology in Dell IM for creating a virtualization-ready data center is the logical separation of server software—its “personality,” or persona—from the actual hardware on which it runs. In this context, a server’s persona is a software construct that combines the server’s OS and installed applications with metadata that describes its unique properties and configuration. The persona resides in a central storage repository in its native OS format and can be booted on any suitable physical server or VM. The metadata includes a number of attributes associated with the persona that describe its connectivity, storage, and application-specific configuration.

Dell IM supports Fibre Channel storage area networks (SANs), Internet SCSI (iSCSI) targets, and network attached storage (NAS) as central repositories, as well as the associated boot mechanisms. It dynamically associates personas with suitable servers, and orchestrates changes to network connectivity and storage access. When a physical server or VM fails, a running persona is automatically retargeted to a spare server without administrator intervention. Also, by helping eliminate local disks in servers and powering down servers when not in use, Dell IM can deliver dramatic reductions in power and cooling costs.

Centralizing and automating management

Dell IM incorporates a variety of core functions to help realize the virtualization-ready data center. These features include centralized end-to-end provisioning, automated server failover, integrated virtualization management, and unified infrastructure resource management.

Centralized end-to-end provisioning. Dell IM enables coordinated provisioning for servers and the storage and network connectivity necessary to bring servers to a fully functional state. Rather than manually installing the OS and application image on each server’s local hard disk, a central storage device (Fibre Channel SAN, iSCSI target, or NAS) is used to store and replicate server personas. After a server boots, Dell IM automatically configures the server’s network connectivity—dynamically provisioning the appropriate logical network topology by securely configuring the network switches the server connects to. Dell IM also establishes the appropriate SAN connectivity for each server without circumventing SAN security and best practices.

Automated server failover. Dell IM can help protect all applications in the environment against hardware failure. Dell IM detects server failures and retargets the failed server’s persona to an available spare—either a physical server or a VM. It also automatically provisions network connectivity and storage access for the spare server as it boots up. By helping eliminate the need for complex and expensive clustering solutions, Dell IM helps reduce the number of servers dedicated as standbys or spares.

Integrated virtualization management. Although virtualization has become a pervasive technology, it is often deployed in isolated islands within the data center, with management handled differently than management of the physical infrastructure. Dell IM is designed to integrate virtualization management into overall infrastructure management. It can dynamically boot bare-metal servers as Microsoft® Hyper-V^™, VMware® ESX, or Red Hat® Xen virtualization hosts and manage VM provisioning on those hosts. When clusters of virtualization hosts are required, Dell IM coordinates the configuration of storage and network access shared among cluster members, and can easily increase or decrease cluster capacity as needed. Dell IM also moves server images between physical servers and VMs without conversion—offering a high degree of flexibility to dynamically target server images to an appropriate server type throughout application development, testing, and deployment phases.

Unified infrastructure resource management. Data centers often use a variety of equipment models from a variety of providers, but using specific tools to manage each type of hardware can be difficult and time-consuming. By unifying heterogeneous equipment under a single management framework and presenting a single view of both physical and virtual resources (see Figure 1), Dell IM can deliver a dramatic boost to the efficiency of data center operations. Provisioning is designed for simplicity and ease of use, with multitiered applications and their associated network topologies represented in an intuitive visual way.

Figure 1. Physical infrastructure in the Dell Infrastructure Manager console

Transforming the data center

Dell IM provides a methodology for gradually transforming a data center from static to dynamic. This methodology is designed to make the transformation manageable for IT administrators, particularly in environments that must adhere to existing operational policies related to IP address administration, storage security, network access restrictions, service-level agreements, and so on.

Step 1: Automatic server discovery and remote power control. The transformation of the infrastructure begins with the installation of the Dell IM controller software, followed by automated server discovery and inventory. The controller software itself is designed to be installed on any industry-standard physical server or VM. Existing servers can subsequently be added to the environment without disrupting the applications that currently run on them. After servers have been discovered, they can be powered up or down from the Dell IM console.

Step 2: Persona creation and centralized booting. Dell IM includes tools for persona creation. This step includes migrating server images to a central storage repository and creating the persona of the migrated image. This allows the server persona to then be moved seamlessly among different servers in the data center. If a running server fails, Dell IM automatically retargets the persona to a suitable spare server and sends out an appropriate alert or message.

Step 3: Automated network topology management. The next step in the transformation process is cross-silo coordination, particularly between the server and network silos. Dell IM supports multiple modes of network management that offer increased control over the pace of and extent to which network changes are automated as server personas are deployed. Dell IM also discovers switches and selectively manages only those switch ports it is authorized to configure, and dynamically changes virtual LAN membership of switch ports during persona provisioning or retargeting.

Step 4: Automated persona configuration. The final step involves automating persona configuration and integration with other management software. The agent provides a workload configuration capability that enables administrators to define the startup and shutdown of application-related services. The agent also enables server-side networking that allows the creation of virtual network interfaces to overcome limitations of and dependencies on physical network interfaces.

Unifying management

Managing static data center designs can be difficult and time-consuming, particularly when IT personnel must contend with an array of different hardware from different vendors, each requiring a different management tool. Dell IM offers an open, standards-based software solution designed to unify and simplify management of heterogeneous servers, storage devices, and networks—while offering a smooth migration path toward a virtualization-ready data center that can adapt quickly and easily as enterprise needs change.

Mahesh Natarajan is the director of product management at Scalent Systems.

Dell Infrastructure Manager by Scalent:

DELL.COM/Scalent

Demystifying Deduplication

By Joe Colucci and Kay Benaroch

Deduplication holds the promise of efficient storage and bandwidth utilization, accelerated backup and recovery, reduced costs, and more. Understanding how this technology fits into a comprehensive data management strategy and taking advantage of Dell Services consulting expertise can provide the first steps toward an optimized storage and backup environment.

Deduplication has been around for several years, but as organizations contend with rapid data growth and increasingly constrained IT budgets, this technology has risen to the top of many priority lists—holding the promise of efficient storage capacity and bandwidth utilization, accelerated backup and recovery, reduced costs, and other benefits. At the same time, however, deduplication is surrounded by confusing and even contradictory information from a myriad of sources.

By understanding the basics of deduplication and its place within an overall approach to data management, IT administrators can evaluate how it can help them address their own IT challenges. In addition to the comprehensive Dell™ portfolio of platforms, software, and services designed to optimize storage and backup environments, Dell Services consulting teams can help organizations assess their current infrastructure and goals to determine whether deduplication can help meet their needs and, if so, how they can deploy it for maximum efficiency.

Key Deduplication Technologies and Approaches

Deduplication is the process of eliminating duplicate copies of data and replacing them with pointers to a single copy. It typically serves two main purposes: reducing the amount of storage capacity required to store data, and reducing the network bandwidth required for performing backups or replication. The deduplication process is applied to an entire file system or storage device, which is what primarily differentiates it from compression. Key elements of deduplication include the level of granularity (file-level or block-level deduplication) and where the deduplication occurs during the backup process (at the source client or at the storage target).

Currently, the dominant application for deduplication is backup storage, because of the repetitive nature of backup data. However, deduplication has also moved into other areas such as network attached storage (NAS) and archive storage, a trend that is likely to continue as the technology reaches maturity (see Figure 1).

File-Level and Block-Level Deduplication

Some deduplication processes examine files in their entirety to determine whether they are duplicates, which is referred to as file-level deduplication or single-instance storage (SIS); others break the data into blocks and try to find duplicates among the blocks, which is referred to as block-level deduplication. Block-level deduplication typically provides more granularity and a greater reduction in the amount of utilized storage capacity compared with file-level deduplication. Some deduplication software attempts to increase this efficiency even further by varying the size of the blocks to help locate additional commonalities, an approach known as variable-block deduplication.

Block-level deduplication is typically used for backup storage, but is not typically used with NAS or archiving systems because of the performance impact of the extreme disk fragmentation that block-level deduplication causes by its nature. File-level deduplication, however, can provide significant advantages for NAS. User home directories offer an excellent use case: multiple users often store the same documents or spreadsheets in their home directories. The Microsoft® Windows® Storage Server 2008 platform includes a SIS deduplication feature specifically for this purpose. This feature retains a single copy of a file in a SIS common store and replaces duplicate copies with file system links, all performed transparently to end users.

Microsoft states that it is not uncommon to recover 25–40 percent of existing disk space after a Windows Storage Server 2008 SIS file consolidation has completed.¹ Because backup sizes are reduced for SIS-aware backup solutions, this approach can also help accelerate backup and recovery processes. The Dell NX4 storage system provides file-level deduplication with functionality similar to the Microsoft SIS feature, which can also help reduce backup sizes when using Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP).

Source and Target Deduplication

Deduplication can occur at two points in the backup process: at the source or at the target. Each type has its own advantages and disadvantages. In source deduplication, the deduplication occurs on the host that is being backed up, which helps significantly reduce the amount of data transferred over the network during a backup. By reducing the amount of network traffic, it can also alleviate network bottleneck conditions as well as issues related to backing up over a wide area network (WAN) link. The tradeoff, however, is that this approach uses processor cycles on the backup client itself, which may be undesirable for production servers. More important is that until recently, many source deduplication solutions did not integrate well (if at all) into existing backup environments.

In target deduplication, the deduplication occurs on the backup storage itself. This approach does not reduce the network traffic during the backup, but can help do so when data is replicated off-site for disaster recovery. Target deduplication also avoids using system resources on the backup client. Target deduplication appliances can be a good option because they are generally easier to integrate into existing backup environments than source deduplication solutions.

Target deduplication solutions can use either in-line or post-process deduplication. In-line deduplication means that the data is deduplicated before it is actually written to disk. This approach requires only enough free space to write the changed data, but does require system resources on the appliance during the backup to identify the duplicate data. As processor power and cache sizes have increased, however, this effect has become less significant than it was in the past.

Post-process deduplication writes the backup data in its entirety, and then later deduplicates it as a batch process. The advantage of this approach is that the deduplication process does not affect the write performance during backups. The trade-off is that the storage target must have enough free space to write the entire backup set prior to deduplication—which can negate some of the cost benefit that is typically a primary driver for implementing deduplication.

Disk Versus Tape for Backup Storage

Traditionally, tape has been the most cost-effective medium for backup data storage. However, the operational characteristics of tape devices are also the source of many common backup challenges. Mechanical failures are generally much more common in tape libraries than they are in disk devices because of the physical movement and loading of tapes: robotic arms can fail to align tapes properly and tape leaders can break. Both of these issues can result in a tape stuck in a drive—which then has a cascading effect on the rest of the backup cycle. When these failures occur, the result is often unprotected data and backup administrators being paged in the middle of the night.

Another major challenge is related to performance. Tape drives have a minimum threshold for the rate at which they receive data to keep the tape streaming, or moving constantly. For Linear Tape-Open Ultrium 3 (LTO-3) and LTO-4 technology, this minimum threshold is specified at 27 MB/sec; if this threshold is not met, the tape drive must stop the tape, rewind, and then continue writing. When this process happens repeatedly, it is known as shoe shining, because the movement of tape back and forth across the tape head resembles that of a rag shining a shoe. Shoe shining can further reduce backup performance and cause excessive wear and premature failure of tapes and drives. Backups over slow WAN links are particularly susceptible to these problems, often forcing organizations to place tape devices at remote locations where they do not have staff to support them. Whereas in the past, the throughput of the tape drives was a performance limitation, the current challenge is typically to feed data to the tape drives at a fast enough rate.

In response to exponential growth in data volumes, tape manufacturers have scaled the capacity and performance of tapes and drives—but as this capacity and performance have increased, so too have the minimum data rates. Because backups typically send data over a network to a media server, network bottlenecks are a common performance inhibitor in enterprise backup configurations: media servers often manage numerous tape drives, yet the environment may not provide enough throughput to maximize the performance of even a single drive. Upgrading or deploying additional tape devices to help address performance issues generally only exacerbates the situation.

Finally, tape devices are often inefficient for small backup or recovery jobs, because more time is spent loading, positioning, and unloading the tape than is spent actually reading or writing data.

These issues, along with the overhead of media management, mean that disk is often a more attractive media than tape for backup storage—particularly as disk densities have increased while cost has decreased. Disk devices cannot solve a network bottleneck problem, but because they do not require a minimum data rate to work efficiently, they do not suffer the same ill effects as tape in relation to these bottlenecks. The reduced number of moving parts and support for RAID also typically make disks more reliable than tape.

One of the traditional strongholds for tape has been off-site backup storage for disaster recovery. The bandwidth necessary to replicate backup data often makes replication impractical for anything but business-critical data, which has left shipping tapes off-site as one of the few options for protecting data against damage to the site itself. Because block-level deduplication writes only blocks that have changed since the previous backup, the reduction in capacity and bandwidth requirements for backup data can help further narrow the cost gap between disk and tape—making disk a practical option for local backup storage and making replication a practical option for off-site backup storage (see Figure 2). Other advantages include helping to reduce disk capacity, bandwidth, power, cooling, and space requirements; accelerate recovery times and increase availability; and centralize data protection and archiving processes. These benefits can make it possible to eliminate tape in more instances (if not completely) than was previously possible.

 Deduplication Ratio

The deduplication ratio is typically used in backup environments to measure how much a deduplication solution can reduce the amount of storage consumed. A 20:1 ratio, for example, means that storage consumption is reduced by 95 percent. However, this ratio does not necessarily mean that administrators can now store 20 times as much data on a disk. For example, if the original data set is 500 GB, this ratio does not mean that they can now store that same 500 GB in 25 GB. Instead, it means that they could likely retain multiple backup versions of that 500 GB in much less space—for example, using only 525 GB for five versions rather than 2.5 TB.

Exact deduplication ratios are generally difficult to predict, because they must account for multiple variables. In addition to the algorithms used in the deduplication process, the ratio can be affected by data change rates, data types, the mix of full or incremental backups, and retention periods, any or all of which may differ even within a single environment. In addition, software that measures data change rates typically can track only the number of files changed, not the amount of data within each file that was changed. Tools to predict a deduplication ratio should generally be used only for estimated sizing.

File Type

File type does not have an effect on file-level deduplication. When using block-level deduplication in a backup environment, however, administrators should keep in mind that some file formats may deduplicate better than others. Deduplication solutions typically find duplicate data in two scenarios: when the same files are backed up more than once, and when duplicate data is found within a given data set. For example, when backing up a user share, deduplication solutions are likely to find duplicate data on the first backup, because multiple users may have saved the same file or modified versions of the same file. Organizations can gain significant savings on backup disk usage even on the first backup when this type of duplication is present.

Microsoft Office files tend to deduplicate well on the block level, because they often have overlapping content: there are only so many words in the dictionary, and some words are much more common than others. Compressed or media files, in contrast, tend to deduplicate less well, because they can have a much wider range of values.

Data that has a high change rate tends not to benefit as much from either type of deduplication as data with a lower change rate. In backup environments, backup data with a long retention period tends to benefit more from deduplication than data with a shorter retention period.

Dell Services and Comprehensive Data Management

Deduplication can be a highly effective data management tool—but it is not the only data management tool. Dell views deduplication as part an overall data management strategy rather than as a solution in itself, and therefore includes deduplication as part of its backup, recovery, and archiving services rather than as a standalone service.

Deduplication can help address many challenges, especially in a backup environment. However, approaching a specific problem from a narrow perspective may not lead to the best solution. Figure 3, for example, shows a change analysis performed during a real-world Dell Services engagement. At the time this sample was taken, 42 percent of the organization’s 3,691 GB of data had not been modified in over a year. If the Dell team were focused solely on deduplication, this would appear to be a good use case. However, when considering an overall strategy, this environment could be better suited for an archiving system—perhaps in addition to deduplication.

 The Dell Data Management consulting team can perform an analysis on an organization’s data, IT environment, and requirements to help determine whether deduplication is a good option and, if so, which solution is best suited to that organization. Partnerships with deduplication industry leaders enable Dell to select a best-of-breed product as part of a comprehensive solution for specific enterprise needs.

Deduplication and Storage Efficiency

When considering a deduplication solution, it is important to evaluate the specific environment and set clearly defined requirements. Is network bandwidth during the backup process a problem? Do backup processes run over a WAN or a slow network connection? Does the data need to be retained for long periods of time? Understanding the needs of the organization goes a long way toward identifying a solution that can effectively address those needs. In addition, organizations should evaluate how individual products are implemented and how easily they can integrate into the existing environment—considerations that are more important than a deduplication ratio.

Finally, deduplication should be deployed as part of an overall Intelligent Data Management strategy that also includes archiving and storage tiering considerations. Dell Services can help organizations create this type of strategy and identify where deduplication fits in to help maximize efficiency in their storage and backup environments.

Preprinted from Dell Power Solutions, Q1 2010. Copyright © 2009 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.

A Simple Guide to the Efficient Enterprise

Recent technology advances in five key areas put efficiency gains on the fast track. Here’s how Dell can help CIOs capitalize on virtualization, mobility management, storage optimization, cloud services, and automated IT management.

 Boosting enterprise efficiency doesn’t have to be complicated. Dell combines the latest technologies with best practices and extensive industry expertise to help IT executives get their bearings in five primary areas that accelerate adoption of the Efficient Enterprise model. Now, with the acquisition of Perot Systems, the expanded Dell Services team has more than 40,000 highly skilled professionals at the ready to develop and deliver end-to-end IT services and business solutions geared to reduce overhead and lower costs—so organizations can focus more of their resources on innovation.

Virtualization: Establish an operational framework

It’s no secret that virtualization technologies help improve efficiency and cost savings through increased computing density, which can significantly decrease the floor space, power consumption, and administrative requirements to run a data center. At the same time, virtualization streamlines deployment, provisioning, capacity planning, chargebacks, security, and systems management. Unfortunately, many IT executives hit operational roadblocks that dilute their projected return on investment. To help overcome those hurdles, the Dell Services team focuses on the most opportune way to operationalize virtualization technologies as they are deployed.

For example, the Dell ProConsult Services data center optimization and virtualization practice helps enterprises tap into an extensive pool of expertise, innovative tools, and automated analysis to assist IT strategists in driving virtualization projects from pilot to production. Dell offers workshops that explore customer challenges, operational readiness assessments designed to help organizations understand the impact virtualization may have on their current environment, and gap analyses to identify action items for getting the company prepared for a virtualized environment.

In addition, the Dell Services team provides a virtualization operations framework dashboard for each engagement. This dashboard establishes metrics and provides reporting for critical success factors.

Mobility management: Simplify and centralize

While legions of remote workers are already changing what it means to conduct business as usual, mobile workers also pose a big challenge for managing and securing remote systems and data. Distribution and imaging of laptops can be complex and costly. Existing systems management tools are not designed to track and push updates for a large mix of mobile assets. In addition, confidential data must not fall into the wrong hands when a mobile system is lost or stolen.

Dell can help IT executives address these considerations through comprehensive mobility management solutions. For example, Dell can distribute client systems directly to end users through Dell^™ Automated Deployment and Dell ImageDirect—sparing IT departments the cost and hassle of handling deployment and imaging processes in-house. In addition, Dell Distributed Device Management software, delivered as a service, provides a cost-effective systems management platform specifically designed to handle the needs of the mobile workforce. Laptop data encryption services also help keep data on mobile computers safe in case of loss or theft.

Storage optimization: Scale flexibly and cost-effectively

While IT budgets remain flat, data storage requirements continue to increase at a breakneck pace. As a result, a large percentage of IT staff resources are spent managing backup processes and searching for data. Even worse, unnecessarily redundant data can bloat systems and compound IT complexity.

Dell Data Management and Protection Services efficiently support data availability, retention, and recovery. The Dell Services team can create cost-effective archiving solutions to better manage record retention, as well as assist in migrating lower-tier storage to lower-cost platforms—which can dramatically cut total storage costs. Dell also helps IT organizations take advantage of advanced technologies such as data deduplication in the way that is most appropriate for their infrastructure.

As part of a broader storage optimization effort, Dell can design, plan, and implement a sound disaster recovery strategy that helps safeguard business continuity with explicit recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives. Dell supports these engagements with an industry-leading e-mail continuity solution, disaster recovery virtualization services, managed backup offerings, and an innovative crisis management and alerting service that helps companies communicate with employees during a crisis or disaster.

Cloud services: Free IT staff for strategic projects

Traditional on-site systems can be slow to change and difficult to scale—a significant disadvantage as IT teams are asked to do more with less. Cloud services offer an efficient model that can augment existing infrastructures with additional flexibility and help free IT staff to work on strategic projects rather than day-to-day systems management.

Dell helps companies leverage the benefits of cloud computing by pragmatically combining the power of software as a service (SaaS) with Dell’s infrastructure support and expertise. SaaS offerings can be deployed in as little as a day and scale when needed. Monthly costs are predictable, and enterprises pay only for what they use. With near-zero maintenance and automatic upgrades included, these services enhance IT flexibility and business agility. And when uptime is important for critical applications such as e-mail, a cloud-delivered approach such as Dell Email Management Services helps ensure fast failover to avoid disruption.

Automated IT management: Streamline maintenance

Dell Services goes beyond simply providing outsourced labor to bring best practices, advanced tools, and automation to the table. By managing any or every portion of the IT life cycle—from configuration and deployment to field service to asset recovery—the Dell Services team helps IT executives reallocate spending from systems maintenance to strategic initiatives that advance business and organizational goals.

For example, with the acquisition of Perot Systems, Dell now offers fully hosted virtual desktops. Providing desktops as a service helps eliminate the need for IT organizations to procure and manage their own physical resources. Companies buy only what they need—including related support, updates, and maintenance.

Pragmatic approach: Tailor IT services to organizational needs

In each of these five key areas, the Dell approach is modular, adaptive, and flexible—the Dell Services team helps CIOs take advantage of innovations such as SaaS and cloud delivery wherever they make sense. As a result, executives can buy IT services that fit their organizations best: multiyear contracts, pay-as-you-go managed services, or fixed-scope consulting engagements.

To learn more about how Dell Services can help your organization become an Efficient Enterprise, please visit DELL.COM/Services.

It’s Time to Kick Business Innovation into High Gear

The Efficient Enterprise model applies the same financial discipline to IT as to other business units and manages the IT budget in terms of meeting corporate objectives—addressing top-line sales and revenue as well as bottom-line profit and loss. Three key strategies enable CIOs to transition IT from a cost center to an investment center: standardization, simplification, and automation.

Rapidly converging macroeconomic, business, and technology trends in the global economy have changed enterprise efficiency from a bragging point into a make-or-break proposition. Investing in the right technology mix can unleash innovation and sustain unprecedented growth. Choose wrong and you may strangle your organization’s chance for long-term survival as mobile computing technologies and social media transform the workforce while consolidation, virtualization, and cloud computing continue to reshape the IT infrastructure.

This premium on efficiency is also transforming the way top executives view and budget for enterprise technology. IT supports virtually every business process—so a commitment to improving IT efficiency naturally leads to significant improvements in overall business efficiency.

However, technology strategists are facing a harsh reality. All too often, as much as 80 percent of the IT budget is consumed simply by maintaining a legacy environment. This situation is not sustainable. Organizations are already spending trillions of dollars each year to build and maintain IT infrastructures—and demand for IT services and innovation can only continue to grow. At the same time, a disproportionate amount of the IT budget in most organizations is typically consumed by maintaining daily operations, because IT is viewed as a cost center and strategic investments are limited to business projects.

Although technology advances have dramatically enhanced productivity over the last two decades, further progress on productivity gains tends to slow when budgets are trimmed. As a result, many CIOs are left without adequate reserves to invest in capital and resources for strategic projects, because a high percentage of IT spending now goes toward maintaining baseline services.

Unfettering Innovation

Of the annual US$1.2 trillion in estimated IT infrastructure–related spending worldwide, 80 percent is devoted simply to maintain current systems—not on strategic projects. Dell has made an industry commitment to help take US$200 billion of inefficiency out of that spend to help organizations reallocate funding to innovation, growth, and competitive advantage.

The Efficient Enterprise strategy offers a new economic model for managing IT, from the desktop to the data center. Too many past approaches focused exclusively on savings, without accounting for how efficient the operation was—regardless of the cost. For this reason, it is essential to measure the contribution IT makes to the pursuit of corporate objectives rather than evaluating it in absolute monetary terms. The goal of the Efficient Enterprise model: Enable organizations to break free of the status quo, invest in innovation, and drive competitive advantage.

The Efficient Enterprise strategy provides CIOs with a pragmatic and phased approach that maps out three key steps to help their organizations maximize efficiency and, in turn, deliver efficiency for the business.

Standardization is about deploying solutions that leverage accepted industry standards to drive out the cost and inefficiencies that come with proprietary architectures. Simplification is about making the complex simple—leveraging pragmatic solutions like virtualization and storage consolidation to get the most out of your infrastructure. Automation is about streamlining services delivery and enabling self-service IT models where critical business services can be deployed through the cloud.

Standardize

Standardization is the practice of eliminating disparate, proprietary, and legacy systems and replacing them with standards-based components to reduce complexity. These efforts can both promote uniformity to help simplify IT staff training and simplify the end-user experience. Standardization also helps to reduce administration, troubleshooting, and repair costs—freeing IT staff to focus on strategic innovation rather than maintenance of legacy systems.

Dell has built its entire history on standardizing technology since the company began helping clients move to standards-based systems 25 years ago. Today, most enterprise applications run on x86 systems. Dell experts offer the flexibility, experience, and partner relationships to build the appropriate technology stack based on specific business and organizational requirements. In addition, Dell plans to continue driving innovation on open server and storage platforms—as well as IT processes, the network fabric, and IT tool sets.

x86, Linux®, Microsoft® Windows®, and other standards now offer comparable levels of reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) along with performance parity to proprietary legacy architectures for most business applications. These performance levels mean that standards-based architectures can leave your options open for best strategic advantage.

In addition, x86 infrastructures are flexible and scalable in both directions. Mainframes start out big and only get bigger, but the x86 architecture lets organizations buy only the capacity they need, then add to it on demand by racking additional servers and adding them to the pool of virtual machines. Rather than forcing your IT department to buy old technology to accommodate growth, flexible x86 infrastructures can take advantage of the most powerful and efficient servers with each node they add.

Standardizing processes is equally important. Internal development and redevelopment of processes can be time-consuming and costly—but by leveraging the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) approach to IT service management, enterprises can increase productivity and reduce labor expenses. The Dell^™ Management Console Powered by Altiris^™ from Symantec^™ is based on ITIL principles and helps to facilitate the adoption of industry best practices in IT environments based on Dell systems.

Steve Hassell, vice president and CIO at Emerson, selected Dell blade servers with the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series to power all of the company’s x86 platform–based systems. “We stepped back and asked ourselves how we could raise the bar in terms of performance, scalability, reliability, and low operating cost,” says Hassell. “We also had to dramatically reduce our server footprint and power envelope if we were going to eliminate our approximately 135 data centers.” The company expects to consolidate 3,800 physical servers down to approximately 200 new, more powerful Dell servers that are capable of delivering worldwide IT services for the entire company.

Simplify

Once the environment is standardized, redundant and underutilized systems can be identified much more easily. Simplification can now take place in the form of consolidation and elimination of data centers, servers, storage, and applications. Virtualization is one key strategy for simplification—by facilitating server and storage consolidation to make efficient use of computing resources, virtualization can deliver significant cost savings compared with all-physical configurations. Reducing application space through virtualization allows IT staff to easily remove and repurpose servers for other uses. What’s more, virtualization provides a path to cloud computing services, because software delivered as a service requires computing power and storage resources that are available on demand.

Simplification also cuts administrative overhead by allowing organizations to avoid purchasing unnecessary infrastructure. It can also reduce the number of potential failure points while boosting uptime, reducing touch points, and mitigating risk. And with fewer physical systems to manage, IT leaders can reduce power and cooling expenditures—the first step toward environmentally responsible operations.

Japanese telecommunications company Kyocera uses virtualization to optimize the use of IT resources and deliver services to users on demand. “Previously, when customers came to us with substantial data center hosting requirements, we would have had to purchase additional servers to meet demand,” says Yutaka Sugita, supervisor for the KCCS Platform Group. “With virtualization, we can boost or reduce computing resources based on business priorities without having to purchase additional equipment.”

Consolidating management platforms offers another avenue for simplification. The Dell Management Console helps simplify IT and create stability by shrinking infrastructure management to a “single pane of glass.” It provides centralized access to management tools and a common data source for managing the entire infrastructure—helping to enhance productivity and give employees more time to focus on innovation rather than simply keeping the lights on.

In addition, tiered storage configurations can help lower costs while simplifying storage management. Recently created or frequently used information is stored on fast, more expensive media and automatically moved to lower-cost systems over time according to business rules. This approach can help IT staff maintain high data availability while simplifying retention and recovery.

“Keeping data in centralized, shared systems greatly simplifies storage management, especially compared with server-attached storage,” says Rob Branson, director of infrastructure technology for PACCAR. “With fewer storage systems, tasks such as backup and recovery are faster and easier. We also plan to replicate our data center for disaster recovery, and we expect the SANs will make that process simpler.”

Other strategies for simplification can include data deduplication, which eliminates redundant records across the enterprise to streamline information management and storage administration, and centralized systems management through software as a service (SaaS).

Automate

The goal of automation is to deliver new services models to keep technology—not people—working harder. By reducing manual interaction with IT infrastructure, companies can cut labor expenses as well as boost productivity and better manage growth. With a standardized and simplified environment, it is now easier and more cost-effective to implement tools to automate the IT infrastructure.

SaaS offers one path to automation. For example, Dell Email Management Services (EMS) can help organizations effectively avoid e-mail downtime by offering a standby e-mail system designed to make primary e-mail system outages virtually invisible to end users and help ensure that key data is never lost—no matter what happens to the IT infrastructure or staff. In addition, Dell EMS can streamline legal discovery and compliance for e-mail archives.

Managed services are another route to increased IT automation. Dell offers a range of services—from system configuration to help-desk management—designed to free up IT resources by managing client operations remotely. For companies moving to the Microsoft Windows 7 OS, Dell provides comprehensive end-to-end services that utilize patented tools and automation to provide a rapid, cost-effective, and trouble-free migration.

The convenience store chain 7-Eleven uses Dell Distributed Device Management Services to track dispersed assets, distribute software, and manage patches. “All our laptop software is patched as needed,” says Brian Cator, senior director of IT at 7-Eleven. “This is true not only for Microsoft patches, which are very frequent, but also antivirus patches, which improve our overall security. And with up-to-date software, fewer incidents, and better compliance, our user base is 30 percent more productive with Dell Distributed Device Management Services. And I sleep better at night.”

Changing the Rules

Unleashing innovation is more important than ever—and creating a solid foundation of enterprise efficiency is the first step toward making it happen. By standardizing IT infrastructures, simplifying technology and processes, and automating services, IT leaders can put their organizations on the path to business advantage.

 To learn more about the Efficient Enterprise, please visit DELL.COM/Efficiency.

Investing in Productivity

Refreshing legacy hardware, renewing existing systems with enhanced functionality, and redeploying systems for new purposes advances enterprise efficiency and helps you get the most out of your IT investment. Here’s how.

Managing a fleet of desktops, laptops, and workstations across an enterprise presents major challenges. What are the best ways to simplify IT management, enhance security, and boost your employees’ productivity? What changes might help reduce energy use and ensure environmental sustainability? How can you make the most of your company’s investments in client systems throughout their life spans?

The three key strategies of refreshing, renewing, and redeploying can help your business address these daily challenges. By refreshing legacy client systems with latest-generation hardware, employees and IT staff alike can gain the productivity, security, and efficiency benefits of advanced features and technologies. And by renewing existing systems with new software tools or hardware components, or redeploying these systems for new purposes, you can extract maximum value from the investments you’ve already made.

Refreshing Legacy Hardware

In many cases, refreshing your desktops, laptops, and workstations with new systems equipped with the latest technologies offers the fastest and most effective way to maximize efficiency and productivity. Deploying new systems in place of aging hardware can offer hardware and software tools to help simplify systems management, tighten security, increase productivity, and improve energy efficiency, while effective life cycle management offers opportunities to reduce costs and potentially subsidize the investment in new equipment:

• Systems management: New client systems that incorporate the latest hardware and software management tools can dramatically reduce the time that your IT staff spends on routine administration—enabling them to focus instead on strategic business priorities. For example, leveraging Intel® vPro™ technology on new systems can simplify remote management of your entire fleet of PCs, enabling IT staff to push software updates, diagnose software problems, track assets, enhance security, and power down systems, all from a centralized location.
• Security: Advances in client security technologies over the past few years can offer sophisticated protection for sensitive enterprise data. Key features in Dell™ Latitude™ E-Family laptops, for example—including integrated fingerprint readers, facial recognition technology, contactless smart card readers, and hardware-based Trusted Platform Module (TPM) and Dell ControlVault™ credential management—offer strong protection for company networks and data. Using self-encrypting drives makes it easy to keep information safe even if a system is lost or stolen.
• End-user productivity: Refreshing client systems also helps improve employee productivity. Powerful multi-core processors and increased memory capacities facilitate multitasking and increased mobility by enabling users to take advantage of processor-intensive voice over IP (VoIP) and Web conferencing software. New systems with enhanced battery life and software utilities such as Dell ControlPoint enable employees to stay productive while traveling and help simplify power, security, and connectivity functions. And moving to new client systems also helps smooth transitions to the latest software and operating systems—including the Microsoft® Windows® 7 OS—for both end users and your IT staff.
• Energy efficiency and environmental sustainability: Latest-generation hardware offers significant savings on energy costs while enhancing environmental sustainability. To help reduce the environmental impact of refreshes, be sure to work with vendors that use eco-friendly packaging, offer carbon offsets, and comply with environmental standards. Systems that meet U.S. ENERGY STAR program requirements are designed for efficient energy use, while systems with Intel vPro technology enable IT administrators to power down clients remotely to help cut costs. Programs such as the Dell “Plant a Tree for Me” and “Plant a Forest for Me” initiatives, meanwhile, help offset IT-related carbon emissions when purchasing new hardware.
• Life cycle management: You can help reduce the net costs of refreshing client systems and further reduce the environmental impact of IT through effective life cycle management. Programs such as Dell Asset Recovery Services can resell components and provide the proper recycling and disposal of remaining materials, helping avoid the need to send computers to a landfill and retaining some of the value of legacy equipment—savings that can then help subsidize the costs of new systems. And frequently refreshing systems can actually help maximize the value of asset recovery.

Renewing and Redeploying Existing Systems

Refreshing client hardware to capitalize on new technologies can offer substantial benefits—but it’s not necessarily the whole story. Renewing and redeploying systems helps you maximize the return from existing investments across these same five key areas:

• Systems management: If your organization is currently relying on multiple legacy management tools, consider replacing them with a centralized, integrated console. This approach helps to simplify IT monitoring and maintenance tasks, eliminate administrative overhead, and enable IT staff to spend their time on more important tasks than administering their management tools.
• Security: Tighten security of existing systems by updating hardware with new authentication technologies. You can integrate USB-connected contactless card readers or fingerprint readers for simple user authentication, or add Webcams to desktops for authentication through facial recognition. To help prevent the theft of components or entire systems, install security locks and management software that monitors chassis intrusion.
• End-user productivity: Adding memory to legacy client systems is often an easy and effective way to enhance worker productivity, providing a much-needed performance boost for employees who use memory-intensive applications or run many applications simultaneously. Upgrading software or installing an OS upgrade such as Windows 7 offers another relatively simple way to revitalize systems. Hardware upgrades can help as well: replacing laptop batteries or providing broadband cards, for example, can significantly enhance mobile productivity.
• Energy efficiency and environmental sustainability: Even without purchasing new systems, you can reduce the energy costs and the environmental impact of running a fleet of client systems. Conducting energy assessments and implementing monitoring software helps pinpoint simple changes for reducing energy use. Using management capabilities that let IT staff power down systems at night can also save energy and cut costs.
• Life cycle management: Renewing client systems with new hardware and software and redeploying systems for new uses helps extend their useful lives. By repurposing legacy desktops and laptops as thin clients, for example, you can give employees access to up-to-date applications through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model without needing the latest processors or the largest hard drives. Similarly, extending warranty and support contracts helps ensure continued functionality, adding value to the renewed and redeployed systems. Implementing tools that let you track hardware and software assets as well as upcoming changes to product lines can help monitor usage of existing systems while planning for the next refresh cycle.

It’s Not All or Nothing

Refreshing, renewing, and redeploying are not mutually exclusive—you might, for example, choose to refresh laptops, renew desktops and workstations with new hardware or software, and redeploy older laptops as thin clients. Finding the right combination of these three strategies can help you address ongoing challenges and make the most of your IT investments.

Defensive Maneuvers

Responding to a legal challenge requires you to find, analyze, and understand critical evidence—fast. Effective content management practices are the key.

Enterprises have always had good reason to be prepared for lawsuits. But in December 2006, Congress gave them even more incentive: the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), in addition to Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and other industry-specific regulatory and legislative measures, were altered to require that corporations know where important documents are located, retain certain types of information for prescribed periods, and be able to find and provide information for opposing counsel and the court.

However, with data volumes proliferating at a record pace, meeting these requirements is no easy task. The sheer amount of information stored in corporate databases means that legal discovery cannot be performed manually—and often, key information exists in e-mails or call transcripts that are not easily searchable. For these reasons, companies need technology solutions that enable them to manage both structured and unstructured information, wherever that information resides.

An enterprise content management (ECM) framework can provide these capabilities. By managing content throughout its lifecycle with centralized, automated processes, ECM helps to support maximum efficiency and defensibility. And because electronic records are stored according to their metadata, they leave an audit trail that allows counsel to track its evolution and path from origination through archiving. These audit trails make it easier for investigators to detect spoliation—the intentional or negligent destruction, alteration, or withholding of evidence.

The e-discovery process begins where ECM leaves off. Together, these systems support an automated, end-to-end workflow that starts with content origination and ends with long-term information lifecycle management. In this way, content can be searched and flagged at any point for legal review.

The storage systems you choose for your data center can significantly impact the success of your ECM and e-discovery processes. Balancing access speed and cost-efficiency requirements should be a top priority. For example, unlike storage systems that use Fibre Channel connectivity, systems based on Internet SCSI (iSCSI) use TCP/IP and therefore can be employed over long distances. This capability makes iSCSI a good choice for offsite data backup and storage.

In today’s environment, where compliance regulations for electronic information continue to tighten and the potential business impact of legal action will only increase, your enterprise cannot afford to wait until you are facing a lawsuit to devise a strong content management strategy—and ECM repositories and e-discovery applications are natural partners.

Ready, Set, Go! 5 Steps for a Successful Windows 7 Enterprise Deployment

A comprehensive readiness assessment can help you discover whether your organization is prepared for migration to the Microsoft® Windows® 7 Enterprise OS—and what you need to do beforehand to help ensure a successful deployment.

The first step in virtually any migration is to understand your starting point. However, with thousands of desktops, laptops, and mobile devices to track and maintain, large enterprise IT departments do not always have a complete picture of which operating systems and applications employees and key contractors are using. To make matters worse, few enterprises are currently leveraging automation technologies to manage and maintain client computing environments efficiently.

Although IT administrators typically operate in hybrid environments with some level of automation, they also continue to rely largely on manual intervention. Unfortunately, without a comprehensive understanding of the assets already in use throughout the enterprise, IT organizations often cannot leverage automation to best advantage and reap the benefits of migrating to Microsoft Windows 7 Enterprise—the version of Windows that is specifically architected for business users.

Migrations are often logistically complex. How can IT strategists help ensure a successful Windows 7 Enterprise deployment? The process of coordinating equipment shipments, managing on-site technicians, and scheduling users can be cumbersome and time-consuming. However, advance planning and preparation helps to dramatically reduce labor and associated deployment expenses.

In particular, proper preparation enables IT teams to optimize deployments and avoid costly mistakes. In addition, planning ahead can help to facilitate multitasking, minimize network traffic, maximize logistical flexibility, reduce infrastructure dependencies, and accommodate out-of-band deployments for remote users.

Five key steps can help ensure a smooth transition to Windows 7 Enterprise:

1. Evaluate the readiness of the organization and of end users. Determining readiness to migrate to Windows 7 Enterprise starts with understanding the way workers in your enterprise are currently using their computers. Because unprepared employees are likely to bombard your support centers with questions, end users must be properly briefed before making the switch from their current desktop environments to Windows 7 Enterprise.
   Proper advance notification and training can help to minimize IT support calls and avoid interrupting business productivity. Gap analysis is typically the best way to determine how to announce the migration and give employees the training they may need to use Windows 7 Enterprise effectively. Take stock of how workers feel about their current OS, identify needs that are not currently being met, and communicate the advantages of Windows 7 Enterprise in terms of new capabilities that can help increase productivity and efficiency.
2. Evaluate hardware compatibility. Windows 7 Enterprise requires certain hardware features to run—features that are available in current Dell™ OptiPlex™ desktops, Dell Latitude™ laptops, and Dell Precision™ workstations.
   However, for organizations that choose to maintain legacy systems, ensuring that all hardware platforms meet these prerequisites can help avert headaches during the migration process. Start by taking a comprehensive inventory of the desktops, laptops, and mobile devices workers are using. Next, create a return-on-investment business case for improving quality of work and lowering costs for client system deployments. Address bottom-line considerations by explaining how the strategic investment in capital equipment can both advance business goals and save on operating expenses. When necessary, refresh client systems—perform user-specific automated image and application configuration, migrate data and settings, and update any outdated drivers on end-user devices.
3. Evaluate office application readiness and compatibility. Migrating to Windows 7 Enterprise may cause some applications to work differently than users expect. By flagging potential issues ahead of the migration, you can update or replace applications if necessary to avoid these problems.
   Begin by conducting a comprehensive survey of the applications in use throughout the organization. Create reporting mechanisms that identify applications incompatible with Windows 7 Enterprise to help prevent problems and avoid rework later in the migration process. If any redundant applications exist, remove them to help streamline IT administration—then standardize application selections and versions to help simplify future deployments and maintenance for IT staff. Prioritize applications for compatibility assessments and possible remediation.
   Once the list of applications has been finalized, gather requirements for each packaged application (including source, installation instructions, technical dependencies, and test scripts). Then perform user acceptance testing for packaged applications to help ensure that user productivity will not be impaired following the deployment.
4. Lay the technology foundation for new features. Some Windows 7 Enterprise features that IT administrators may find most valuable require additional supporting technologies in the data center. Organizations can prepare to get the most out of Windows 7 Enterprise by upgrading to the Microsoft Windows Server® 2008 R2 OS—which is required, for example, to support the Microsoft BranchCache™ and DirectAccess features. In addition, Windows Server 2008 R2 is designed to facilitate advanced server and desktop virtualization, enhance power management, and support unprecedented workload size, dynamic scalability, and across-the-board availability and reliability. IT departments can further lay the groundwork for Windows 7 Enterprise by implementing IP version 6 (IPv6) and IP Security (IPsec), which provide key support for the DirectAccess feature.
5. Create a deployment strategy. By formulating and following a well-designed deployment strategy, enterprise IT leaders can create an optimized, scalable, automated deployment process that is repeatable throughout the organization.
   The first step to creating a solid deployment strategy is to consolidate the installed application base as much as possible. This effort helps reduce complexity, simplify administration, and enhance IT efficiency before the deployment. Next, test deployment procedures thoroughly in a controlled environment to help work out kinks in advance. Finally, have a support strategy in place for any unexpected issues that may arise.

Successfully deploying Windows 7 Enterprise depends on making proper preparations. By determining your company’s readiness to migrate ahead of time, you can anticipate potential pitfalls and avoid rework later in the migration process. A well-designed deployment strategy provides a blueprint for an optimized, scalable, automated deployment process that is repeatable throughout the organization—and these five steps pave the way.

Top 10 Enterprise Features in Windows 7

Microsoft® Windows® 7 Enterprise is designed to meet the evolving needs of users and IT professionals alike. Explore the top 10 features that will also make CIOs smile.

Desktop operating systems are geared toward making life easy for end users—and Microsoft Windows 7 is no exception. Performing everyday tasks and working on new projects is designed to be more intuitive than with any previous Windows system. The Windows 7 OS is also designed to be fast, reliable, and more secure than the Windows XP and Windows Vista® operating systems. Most importantly, productivity enhancements help remove barriers that prevent access to information, regardless of where the data is stored.

At the same time, the Windows 7 Enterprise platform helps simplify management by making it easy for IT organizations to meet diverse client requirements. It offers enhanced security and control by building on the security foundation of Windows Vista, and delivers additional flexibility for IT teams charged with securing desktop and mobile client systems and data. In addition, because administrators can often leverage the same tools and skills they use with Windows Vista for Windows 7 Enterprise desktops, laptops, and virtualized environments, the transition requires minimal training—freeing IT staff to focus on strategic projects.

Ten key features of Windows 7 Enterprise work in conjunction with the Microsoft Windows Server® 2008 R2 OS to advance enterprise efficiency:

1. DirectAccess connectivity: As the workforce becomes increasingly mobile and many employees work remotely at least part of the time, the question of productivity becomes increasingly critical. To be as productive as they could be in the office, workers must be able to connect to enterprise resources seamlessly and securely.
   The DirectAccess feature enables mobile users to access enterprise resources simply and securely when out of the office—without the extra step of initiating a virtual private network (VPN) connection. This capability helps to simplify IT management by allowing for an “always managed” infrastructure, which helps ensure that client systems used by mobile workers remain healthy and updated.
2. BranchCache™ local caching: For large enterprises with several branch offices and centralized applications, low network responsiveness and slow connection speeds can create significant bottlenecks that hamper productivity and lead to a subpar user experience. The BranchCache feature helps address this issue by caching content from remote file and Web servers at the local branch office, which allows branch office users to access important information quickly. It supports commonly used network protocols to reduce the need for additional IT training. In addition, the BranchCache feature supports network security protocols such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and IP Security (IPsec), helping to ensure that only authorized clients can access requested data. It also helps to reduce wide area network (WAN) traffic, boost network application responsiveness, and increase efficiency for end users accessing the content.
3. AppLocker™ application control: For enterprises that demand the highest levels of compliance, administrators can leverage the AppLocker feature to dictate which applications are allowed to run on desktop and mobile client systems. This feature provides a flexible, easy-to-administer mechanism that allows IT organizations to exercise control over the infrastructure while also giving workers the ability to run the applications, installation programs, and scripts that they require to be productive. As a result, enterprises can enforce application standardization while also enhancing security and streamlining compliance.
4. BitLocker™ security: Because mobile workers often take sensitive information with them on their laptops when they leave the office, encrypting hard drives and removable storage devices can go a long way toward preventing security breaches.
   The BitLocker feature gives IT administrators and end users the ability to right-click on a drive to enable BitLocker protection. By supporting automatic creation of the required hidden boot partition, BitLocker advances key management over previous versions of Windows. In addition, the BitLocker To Go™ feature offers data protection for removable storage devices and gives the IT team enhanced control over how removable storage devices can be used.
5. RemoteApp™ access: Employees need the same programs when they are working remotely that they use when they are in the office—but installing and maintaining those applications on every laptop can be a serious hurdle for IT staff.
   The RemoteApp feature for Windows 7 Enterprise is designed to enable end users to access the programs they need without actually installing them on the remote computer. Because IT staff can make application updates centrally, this feature helps save administration time and reduce maintenance costs. Updates can then be distributed automatically when users log in.
6. Multilingual support: Instead of creating a separate image for each language used in the enterprise, administrators can use Windows 7 Enterprise language packs to support several dozen different languages using a single Windows master image.
7. Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI): Designed to improve end-user productivity while also simplifying desktop administration and security for IT staff, VDI supports desktop functionality using virtual machines hosted on servers. It allows users to access their desktops remotely, as well as reuse virtual machine images to boot a physical desktop, laptop, or workstation. VDI also helps reduce IT maintenance overhead by centralizing management and avoiding the need to perform patches and upgrades on each physical computer in the enterprise.
8. Image management: For organizations that support multiple operating systems and configurations, image management can be a complex, time-consuming, and costly task. But with the Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) tool in Windows 7, IT administrators can build and service OS images using a single consolidated tool set.
   Image management tools built into Windows 7 Enterprise allow administrators to add optional components; add, enumerate, and remove third-party device drivers; add language packs and apply international settings; and maintain an inventory of offline images. Administrators can also use DISM to manage Windows Vista system images, which helps to reduce administrative overhead and costs for mixed deployments.
9. Power management: Desktop and mobile computers are responsible for a significant percentage of the power consumption in most enterprises. Because cutting down on energy consumption can help IT strategists improve the bottom line, Windows 7 Enterprise includes a variety of power management features designed to increase platform and processor efficiencies. For example, Windows 7 helps improve idle efficiency by minimizing resource utilization and enabling processors, disks, memory, and network activity to go into low-power states during extended periods of inactivity. In addition, technologies such as adaptive display brightness and low-power audio help conserve energy and contribute to an efficient, cost-effective enterprise.
10. Windows PowerShell™ command-line shell: Used with Windows 7 Enterprise, the Windows PowerShell command-line shell and administrator-focused scripting language can help increase management control and enhance IT productivity. The tool helps simplify management of Windows-based servers, workstations, and applications through an interactive shell, scripting functions, and graphical interface applications. It offers more than 130 standard command-line tools and utilities as well as a consistent syntax to enable IT teams to accelerate automation easily. It is also designed to work with existing IT infrastructures and existing script investments to facilitate early adoption, learning, and use.

In these ways, Windows 7 Enterprise can help significantly boost client security and productivity while simplifying end-to-end IT management and control. For large enterprises intent on advancing business efficiency while reducing total cost of ownership, the question is not whether to migrate to Windows 7—but when.