Introducing the IT Service Centric, Automated Data Center

Early in October, Dell announced Active Infrastructure 1.0, which brought outstanding converged infrastructure capabilities to the market. Today, I am excited to announce Active Infrastructure 1.1, which greatly enhances the Active Infrastructure family with new validated workloads, a broader portfolio of pre-integrated systems and reference architectures, and significant enhancements to our unified management platform. These enhancements enable customers to accelerate IT service deployment, maximize efficiency across the IT services lifecycle, and strengthen IT service quality. This enhanced offering will be available to order in late June 2013 in the Americas, and select countries in EMEA and APJ.

Active Solutions
Dell’s Active Solutions start with the IT service in mind, and provide guidance on building out data center systems in support of that service. This approach drastically reduces design and validation cycles for IT services, and ensures predictable and reliable IT service performance. Active Infrastructure 1.1 introduces the following new validated workloads:

  • Enterprise Applications – Microsoft UC&C 2013, Microsoft SQL Server 2012
  • Virtual Desktop – Citrix XenDesktop 5.6, VMware Horizon View 5.2, Microsoft VDI 2012
  • Private Cloud – Microsoft FastTrack 3.0

Active Systems
Dell Active Systems are converged infrastructure platforms and reference architectures that enable IT organizations to significantly accelerate IT service rollout, while ensuring predictable and consistent deployment. The Active Infrastructure 1.1 release presents a broader Active System lineup and 3rd party ecosystem support:

  • Pre-integrated systems: Active System 50, Active System 200, & Active System 1000, and respective reference architectures are added to the pre-integrated lineup. These systems represent evolved versions of Dell’s vStart lineup, which will be discontinued.
  • Reference Architectures – support added for Dell Force10 MXL and Cisco Nexus 5k switches, for customers requiring more advanced networking capabilities.

Active System Manager
Dell Active System Manager automates workload and infrastructure deployment through a single console, simplifying IT service delivery. New with Active Infrastructure 1.1 release is Active System Manager 7.1, which represents a significant leap forward in unified management, and includes:

  • New workload and infrastructure templates that automate deployments
  • More robust feature set including Microsoft Hyper V provisioning, server identity migration, and resource pools.
  • Broader Active System support, which now includes the Active System 50, 200, & 1000
  • Expanded infrastructure compatibility, including Dell PowerEdge rack servers, Dell Force10 MXL, Dell Compellent storage, Brocade Fibre Channel switching, and Cisco Nexus networking.

Active Infrastructure can be ordered in the United States today, and will be available for order throughout the rest of the Americas, as well as select countries in EMEA and APJ, in late June. 

We welcome the opportunity to put these innovations to work in your data center.

About the Author: Dario Zamarian