Traditionally, networking, servers and storage were seen as three very distinct and separate areas, with separate management tools and processes. The dividing lines between these areas began to blur as the accelerating trend of virtualization and need for agile IT mixed these ‘silos’ together and administrators found themselves crossing the boundaries to effectively manage their infrastructures.
Convergence has become a major topic of conversation these days, one with a wide variety of definitions and expectations. Convergence isn’t a fundamentally new concept, but recently servers, storage, networking and management resources have been coming together to create extremely compelling and functional computing solutions. Our customers have told us time and again that the foundation of any enterprise-class converged offering has to begin with exceptionally reliable hardware that is capable of scaling with their needs. When crafting our Dell Active Infrastructure, we logically looked first to Dell’s world-class hardware solutions.
Our award winning 12th Generation PowerEdge blade servers are joined by network modules in leveraging the remarkably efficient M1000e shared power and cooling infrastructure. With a mixture of up to 32 independent, individually-serviceable computational nodes in a single chassis, and leveraging up to six 10/40Gb IO modules supporting three fully-redundant fabrics, the density and flexibility of the Dell modular infrastructure delivers the scalability our customers demand. This combines cutting-edge networking and exceptionally powerful and scalable computational resources into a single seamless, physically-converged offering complete with embedded hardware management, which makes it ideal to use as a starting point for additional converged infrastructure management capabilities.
The end goal of convergence — improving the efficiency and the agility of IT — means that the ability to manage hardware is critical. Our unique agent-free embedded management infrastructure allows for the deployment, maintenance, updating and monitoring of our platforms, in-band or out-of-band, within a single data center or across multiple, geographically-dispersed locations, all without requiring a single software management agent. Thanks to Dell’s innovative management, integrated reporting capabilities and automated parts replacement, our infrastructure can be deployed quicker, is more reliable, and can recover faster in the event of component failure, leading to greater system uptime in both physical and virtual environments. By leveraging these unique agent-free embedded management capabilities, Dell Active System Manager – an intuitive, workload-aware converged infrastructure manager – streamlines configuration and management for the Dell Active Infrastructure family of systems and solutions. Active System Manager enables IT to capture infrastructure requirements, automate configuration, and manage the complete infrastructure lifecycle spanning discovery, inventory, deployment and on-going management.
Wherever our customers are on their personal IT journey, Dell is there for them every step of the way. Dell is committed to providing them with a rock-solid foundation of world-class hardware and industry leading automated systems management upon which they can build and manage their IT infrastructure with confidence.