News
Dell Expands Enterprise Strategy
- By Scott Bekker
- December 05, 2000
Microsoft
has not been the only company anxious to get into the datacenter. While
IBM and
HP have pre-PC experience with mainframes and minicomputers,
Compaq purchased
DEC for its enterprise scale services and solutions. Now its Texas neighbor,
Dell Computer Corp., is getting into the datacenter game.
Today Dell
announced a key partnership with Unisys Corp. to resell Unisys’ ES7000 32-way
Pentium server. Dell is the third of the four major PC vendors to resell the
ES7000 – Compaq and HP have already begun rebranding and reselling the machine.
Unisys will also aid Dell’s initiative to develop an enterprise worthy
consulting organization.
“There’s
been a lot of skepticism in the past few years about Dell, and Dell in the
enterprise,” says Joseph Marengi, senior vice president at Dell. Dell has a
variety of enterprise products like web caches, server appliances, and storage
devices, but lacked machine for large databases. The addition of the ES7000
allows the company to offer a complete end-to-end Windows infrastructure.
However,
the penguin lurked in the shadows of today’s announcement. Another key product
launched today, the PowerApp.web 110 server appliance – a plug and play web
server targeted to ISPs and ASPs – is a Linux-Apache machine. Dell says that Linux provides the best
performance and lowest cost for small server appliances.
Dell also
announced what it says is the first server to use a 1GHz processor. Its 1U
PowerEdge 1550 server can come with up to two 1GHz Pentium III processors, and
4GB of RAM. The company says that it is shipping the units with either Windows
or Linux.
Other
products announced today include the PowerApp.web 120, an appliance server running
either Windows or Linux; the PowerEdge 350, a low cost 1U rackmount server; and
the PowerEdge 8450, a high end database server, cramming eight processors into
7U. Aside from storage devices, Dell introduced new products into nearly every
niche of its enterprise line.
Marengi
hinted that the ES7000 may form the basis of Dell’s Itanium strategy, when
Intel releases the chip next year. “We’re excited about moving into the 64-bit
arena in the next few months,” Marengi said in regard to the Unisys machine.
Unisys is already testing a version of the machine with advance samples
provided by Intel. – Christopher McConnell
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.