Dell Invests $1 Billion in Big Cloud & Virtualization Plans

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The goal of Dell's billion-dollar initiative is to carry you from start to finish with a level of speed and ease that might seem unimaginable to any IT pro currently mired in the virtualization process.

Here's an analogy: You could buy all your favorite band's albums one at a time, or you could buy the box set. If each component of a virtual infrastructure is one album, Dell vStart is the box set. According to the press release:

Dell vStart accelerates and simplifies virtualization adoption by providing an easy way to purchase a complete virtual infrastructure solution delivered ready to run physical and virtual workloads. With vStart an entire functioning virtual infrastructure solution is delivered ready to run up to 100 or 200 virtual machines from a single management environment... The infrastructure is delivered pre-assembled to the customer’s site as a single unit, racked and cabled, and directly from the Dell factory.

vStart is part of a larger plan to significantly enhance Dell's presence in the cloud computing industry -- by increasing and diversifying the services it provides and by expanding internationally by creating new datacenters across the globe. And Dell is working fast, with plans to open 12 "Global Solution Centers" this year and another 10 over the next 18 months.

If you're in the US, you can take a closer look and see for yourself because Dell's vStart is now available. Dell plans to expand vStart into 10 countries in Europe soon, and it will move into the Middle East and Africa in the near future.

Dell has partnered with Microsoft, Citrix, VMWare, Symantec, and CommVault to help you with heterogeneous computing environments. To that end, part of Dell's partnership with Microsoft includes a management tool that "offers a single management point for physical and virtual resources." (Note, however, that this management tool can be used to manage mixed internal environments, but not external public cloud services.)

Dell's new Dell Desktop Virtualization Solutions (DDVS) is another product that rolls a number of tools together into one, to make it quicker and easier to deploy desktop virtualization. Dell says that DDVS "enables customers to support virtually any end-user computing device." We're staying tuned for specific details about precisely which end-user devices will be supported. DDVS is available in the US now and will expand internationally this year.

Intelligent data management, storage-as-a-service, disaster recovery, and email archiving are also elements of Dell's new plan. Looks like a lot of good help for a lot of big problems. Take a look here for more information.