Helping organizations on their path to virtualization and private cloud

If you follow the tech press or social sphere in any capacity you’re well aware of the interest being placed on private cloud architectures as one of the leading trends in the coming years. Among other things, private cloud will help businesses standardize operations and increase agility.  Enterprise private clouds bring the benefits of this trend – predicated on server virtualization – to the next level. In addition to the aforementioned benefits that a virtualized environment brings to the fore,the private cloud brings new capabilities such as multi-tenancy and self-service provisioning—enabling IT to provide Infrastructure as a Service to its customers. But while the benefits of private clouds are numerous, the steps along the way and implementation are often tedious and costly, taking resources away from growing and maintaining your business.

Today, Dell and Microsoft are continuing to deliver on our promise to help customers quickly deploy and manage virtualization and private cloud technologies. 

Together we are delivering integrated solutions that can help you overcome key administration challenges, such as infrastructure elasticity, workload mobility retaining fabric connectivity, and business continuity, with Dell Advanced Infrastructure Management (AIM) software  and software distribution, patch management, and service-level monitoring with Microsoft System Center. The tight integration between these two products delivers deep management insight – across infrastructure, operating systems and applications – and gives IT a simplified, integrated management experience delivered through a “single pane of glass.”

And, for customers looking to take that next step towards integrated virtual infrastructure – and, maybe even private cloud, we can help you do that today with vStartm solutions built with Microsoft Hyper-V.

Dell’s solutions engineering team worked in collaboration with Microsoft, putting to use their extensive experience and expertise, to create a simple, smart, fast path to a private cloud – vStart 200 for Microsoft Private Cloud.

vStart 200m—a new member of the Dell vStart family—contains the pre-sized server, networking, storage infrastructure, Microsoft Hyper-V and Windows Server 2008 R2 DataCenter Edition. This offers unlimited virtualization rights and Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) from Dell for the guest Microsoft Server OS to enable rapid deployment of virtual machines. The vStart 200m is Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track, validated, giving you the assurance that the hardware and the software work together in perfect harmony. With vStart 200m, the leap from virtual infrastructure to the benefits of private cloud is a small one – all you have to do is add Microsoft System Center.

Like all vStart solutions, vStart 200m comes pre-engineered and is shipped pre-built to the customer site and includes initial deployment services and 3 years Pro-Support from Dell.

To learn more about these solutions, visit dell.com/vstart and dell.com/aim.

About the Author: Andy Rhodes