Some DELL pieces....
Tuesday December 5, 1:04 pm Eastern Time
Press Release
Dell Expands Mission-Critical Services to Help Customers Build and Manage Computing Infrastructures
New Consulting and Support Services Facilitate Infrastructure Design, Deployment and Uptime
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 5, 2000-- Dell (Nasdaq:DELL - news) today expanded its comprehensive suite of technical consulting and mission-critical support services to help enterprises rapidly build highly available computing infrastructures while minimizing costly system downtime.
This news supports several other announcements made today by the Company, including the introduction of new Dell PowerApp(tm) and PowerEdge(tm) servers and enhanced systems management software.
``The services introduced today are fundamental elements of Dell's rapidly expanding portfolio of customized enterprise services offerings. These and future Dell services are designed to meet our customers' demands to optimize their network infrastructures, giving them the power to adapt to change and react quickly to new market opportunities where reliance on IT is increasing dramatically,'' said Gary Cotshott, vice president of services for Dell. ``Dell will deliver these services for varying customer environments through an integrated set of tiered offerings -- from standard and dependable rapid support to comprehensive mission critical services.''
New Technology Consulting and Support Services
Dell Technology Consulting helps customers design and build their enterprise infrastructures to support the high-performance and uptime requirements essential to growth. New consulting services include:
Infrastructure Assessment, Architectural Validation and Implementation Services for customers prepared to move to a Microsoft®Windows®2000 based e-commerce environment.
Rapid Design & Deployment Services, a packaged e-commerce solution based on Dell and Microsoft technologies for those customers requiring a rapid production deployment.
Performance Tuning and Stress Testing Services to help insure the infrastructure can accommodate customers' changing network and workload demands.
Helping meet the needs of mission-critical environments, Dell's expanded portfolio of on-site and remote support services are designed to maximize system uptime. These services are:
Enterprise Expertise Center with a Single Point of Contact providing engineer-to-engineer technical support, customized support plans, root cause analysis for issue resolution, proactive health check services, responses to change requests, and reporting. Customers will receive reports summarizing uptime statistics, issue resolution and recommendations for enhancing systems availability.
Remote Monitoring offers proactive, rules-based systems monitoring options, ranging from basic pre-failure alerting to comprehensive server, operating system, and storage monitoring with proactive trend and fault analysis. Systems can be monitored by Dell's Enterprise Expertise Center or by the customer's own local Help Desk.
Comprehensive on-site(a) hardware support, ranging from two-hour response and six-hour(b) hardware repair to customized on-site spares kits and on-site system engineers.
Customized Systems Availability Guarantee Programs(c) provide the right combination of proactive and maintenance services to meet each customer's uptime requirements.
PowerVault Advanced Software and Configuration Support for Dell's storage support offerings, including guaranteed response times for customer-defined levels of criticality, are designed to help ensure customers get expert advice to keep their complex storage systems fully operational.
Dell OpenManage Subscription Service provides quarterly updates of systems management software, updated documentation, and the most recent BIOS, drivers and utilities.
This new suite of services complements Dell's existing offerings that include consulting, custom factory integration, implementation, performance optimization, award-winning 24x7 technical support, and training programs, all designed to get customers up-and-running quickly with their Dell systems.
For nine consecutive quarters, customers have ranked Dell the leading Intel-based server vendor for customer satisfaction, according to Technology Business Research's (TBR) ``Corporate IT Buying Behavior & Customer Satisfaction Study.'' In its most recent report, dated Sept. 7, 2000, TBR cited Dell as ``the only vendor with rising server satisfaction ratings, primarily in the area of on-site support, which this quarter was marked as a competitive strength for the vendor.''
For more information about Dell services, please visit dell.com.
ANd some server updates...
Dell Unveils Next Generation Rack Optimized Servers to Handle Growing Demands of Infrastructure Computing
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 5, 2000--Dell (Nasdaq:DELL - news) unveiled at a news conference here today, the PowerEdge 1550, the most powerful general-purpose server in its class, the PowerEdge 350, a cost-effective general-purpose server, and new PowerApp appliance servers that offer ease-of-deployment and performance features not found on competitive products.
The new systems expand Dell's award-winning line of powerful, ``rack-optimized'' servers, which are ideal for Internet and intranet applications. The servers are just 1U in height (1.75 inches), which allows companies to stack a large amount of computing power into a very small space. Other products in Dell's line of rack-dense servers include the 2U, two processor PowerEdge 2450 server, 4U, four processor PowerEdge 6450 application server, 7U, eight processor PowerEdge 8450 database server and a full line of 1U and 2U PowerApp appliance servers for Web serving, caching and load balancing applications.
``With these new introductions, Dell now has one of the broadest lines of rack optimized servers in the industry,'' said Michael Lambert, senior vice president of Dell's Enterprise Systems Group. ``Our rack dense PowerEdge and PowerApp servers have gained tremendous momentum with a broad range of customers including Ford Motor Company, Toyota Motor Sales of America, USA TODAY.com, Island ECN, Linkguard and Datek Online, among many others.''
General Purpose Servers Offer Flexibility
The PowerEdge 1550 and PowerEdge 350 are general purpose, rack dense servers that offer customers the choice between a 1U server with the industry's highest performance and expandability, and a more cost effective 1U server for infrastructure deployments.
The PowerEdge 1550 provides excellent performance, availability and scalability, including dual Pentium® III processors (up to 1GHz), dual, independent 64-bit/66MHz PCI BUSES for faster throughput, up to 4GB of RAM, and up to 3 hot-pluggable, one-inch SCSI hard drives (with optional PERC 3/DCL RAID controller) for a total storage capacity of up to 108 GB(a). The PowerEdge 1550 server's keyboard, video and mouse (KVM) ports are in the front of the chassis, as well as the rear, for simple accessibility and improved cable management in rack environments.
The PowerEdge 1550 offers configuration and application flexibility to support Internet and network infrastructure applications, such as domain controllers (PDCs/BDCs), Domain Name Server (DNS), Dynamic Host Control Protocol (DHCP), terminal servers and custom Web-based applications.
The PowerEdge 350 is a cost-effective, general-purpose server that supports a single Intel® Celeron(tm) or Pentium III(tm) processor, as many as two IDE hard disk drives, up to 1GB of ECC SDRAM memory and dual, integrated Intel Pro 10/100+ NICs. The PowerEdge 350 offers an even smaller footprint and lower power consumption than the PowerEdge 1550 making it ideal for space-constrained customers who are value driven. The PowerEdge 1550 and PowerEdge 350 will be available with Microsoft® Windows® NT 4.0, Windows 2000 Server or Red Hat® Linux 7 factory installed. For more information on the PowerEdge 1550 and PowerEdge 350, go to www.dell.com/poweredge.
Second Generation PowerApp Servers Unveiled
The company also unveiled today the second generation of its award-winning PowerApp line of appliance servers. The PowerApp.web 120 and PowerApp.web 110 are turnkey Web server appliances that can be deployed in minutes running either Windows Powered IIS 5.0 or Linux Apache 1.3.12. PowerApp.web appliances are ideal for service provides (ISPs/ASPs), managed hosting companies, dot.coms and businesses deploying Internet or intranet environments that rely on simple, ultra rack dense, low cost Web servers that can scale to support their Internet infrastructure.
The PowerApp.web 120 is built on the same high-performance hardware platform as the PowerEdge 1550, while the PowerApp.web 110 is a cost-effective Linux-based Web server that supports a single Intel® Celeron(tm) processor and up to two IDE hard disk drives.
The new PowerApp.web 120 server comes pre-configured with either the Windows Powered or Linux Web server software stacks. Both PowerApp.web servers come with Web-based user interfaces allowing remote or local administration via a browser and Dell's PowerApp Kick-Start quick deployment software, which discovers un-configured PowerApp.web servers on the network and configures them remotely. PowerApp.web 120 feature integrated remote management features and can be managed with Dell OpenManage, Dell's suite of systems management software tools. For more information, go to www.dell.com/powerapp.
The Dell PowerEdge 1550 is scheduled to be available in January 2001 at a starting price of $2,599, and the PowerEdge 350 is slated to be available in February 2001 with a starting price of just $1,499.
The PowerApp.web 110 and PowerApp.web 120, also expected to be available in January 2001, will be priced at $1,499 and $2,599, respectively, including the integrated Web server software stack, and installation and management tools.
About Dell
Dell Computer Corporation (Nasdaq:DELL - news) is the world's leading direct computer systems company, based on revenues of $30 billion for the past four quarters, and is a premier provider of products and services required for customers to build their Internet infrastructures. The company ranks No. 56 on the Fortune 500, No. 210 on the Fortune Global 500 and No. 3 on the Fortune ``most admired'' lists of companies. Dell designs, manufactures and customizes products and services to customer requirements, and offers an extensive selection of software and peripherals. Information on Dell and its products can be obtained on the World Wide Web at www.dell.com.
(a) For hard drives, GB means 1 billion bytes; accessible capacity
Software....
Dell Unveils New OpenManage Systems Management Software
Announces Future Tools to Ease Management of Dell Servers and Storage Systems
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 5, 2000--Dell (Nasdaq:DELL - news) announced new software today that will make it easier for companies to manage the computers that power their enterprise infrastructures and outlined its roadmap for additional systems management tools.
Known as Dell OpenManage(tm), these tools ease the installation and configuration of Dell PowerEdge(tm) and PowerApp(tm) servers, and PowerVault(tm) storage systems, while enhancing system status monitoring, enabling remote systems management, and helping organizations manage and track assets. With today's announcement, these tools enter the sixth generation of their lifecycle.
``We are making significant investments to enhance our systems management portfolio, which we believe make Dell OpenManage the best systems management suite for Intel-based servers in its class,'' said Michael Lambert, senior vice president of Dell's Enterprise Systems Group. ``New offerings today and in the future will help our customers more effectively manage their growing computing infrastructures.''
Dell updated two components of its systems management suite, Dell OpenManage Server Assistant and Dell OpenManage IT Assistant with new features that rank them among the most advanced in their class.
Dell Server Assistant, which helps customers set up their Dell servers -- installing the operating system, configuring drivers, etc. -- now includes the ability to configure RAID (Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks) and storage arrays at the time of system setup.
This new feature enables IT managers to completely set up a Microsoft® Windows® NT server with RAID support in about 20 minutes, nearly twice as fast as was possible before. The combination of storage setup and Dell Server Assistant's wizard-based design make the tool one of the easiest to use and fastest setup utilities in the industry.
Dell IT Assistant helps customers manage Dell servers by monitoring processor status, internal temperature, fan status, etc. and alerting IT managers with screen-based, e-mail and pager messages when there are problems. Version 6.0 integrates new RAID and storage subsystem management as well as access to the Remote Assistant Card in a single user's interface.
The updated agent-based application helps IT managers more effectively troubleshoot problems by automatically launching the appropriate management application, such as the storage array management application to address a system storage issue. The new combination of server and storage management capabilities into one framework makes Dell OpenManage IT Assistant one of the most complete active management solutions available today.
Because all Dell OpenManage tools feature a convenient Web-based interface, systems management is available to administrators from virtually any location on the network.
Next year, Dell plans to further simplify management of its systems by consolidating existing management tools into one Web-based console. The system will provide individual system health monitoring and management as well as management of clusters and storage area networks and will feature:
Management of all Intel-based hardware components, including storage systems, on heterogeneous networks, regardless of vendor;
Enhanced integration with leading systems and application management frameworks, including HP OpenView, CA Unicenter TNG, Tivoli Enterprise Console, Tivoli Netview, BMC Patrol and Microsoft SMS;
Simpler management control for setup and administration of servers and storage systems in remote locations, such as a branch office;
Improved version control utilities to ensure that servers and storage not only run the latest bios and system software, but also that there are no system-level conflicts;
Continued direct integration between a customer's installation and Dell technical support to automatically collect diagnostic hardware and software information and provide Internet-based collaboration between IT managers and Dell;
More robust cluster management capabilities designed to provide setup, configuration and management of all the Microsoft® Cluster Server clusters from a single management console; and
Additional utilities for setting up and managing servers and storage systems quickly and easily.
The newest versions of Dell OpenManage IT and Server Assistant ship with all new Dell servers. For further information about the Dell OpenManage for managing the Internet infrastructure, please visit www.dell.com/openmanage.
The new partner is Imation? |
