Dell blames ‘uncertain adoption’ of Windows 8 for some of its financial woes
Dell blamed Microsoft's Windows 8 as one of several causes for its grim financial future, according to a filing with securities regulators.
"The difficult environment faced by the Company as a result of its underperformance relative to a number of its competitors [includes] ... the uncertain adoption of the Windows 8 operating system," Dell said in a lengthy proxy statement filed Friday with the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The proxy statement laid out Dell's case for shareholders accepting a $24.4 billion offer, led by its founder and CEO, Michael Dell, to take the PC maker private. Michael Dell has joined with private-equity firm Silver Lake Partners to buy the company, with Silver Lake in turn tapping Microsoft for a $2 billion contribution. Read more...
Dell carves out new servers from 10-petaflop supercomputer
Dell announced servers based on designs the company is implementing in an upcoming 10-petaflop supercomputer called Stampede, which will be fully deployed at the University of Texas, Austin, starting next year.
The PowerEdge C8000 servers use standard Intel x86 CPUs and offer the flexibility to include graphics processors or more storage to improve performance on database, high-performance computing or cloud workloads. Customers will have the ability to mix and match graphics processors, storage, memory and other elements inside servers, depending on their computing needs, said Armando Acosta, product manager at Dell. Read more...
Dell, VMware team up on bundled VDI package
Dell and VMware announced a partnership this week through which the two companies will sell a bundled system with server, network, and storage components in support of VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure).
Dell's new vStart for VDI is based on VMware's View 5.1 VDI software and Citrix XenDesktop 5.6. The rack-mountable hardware bundle is validated in various capacity configurations, depending on the size of the business.
Additionally, plug-ins are available for both VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V configurations.
On the hardware side, the vStart for VDI includes Dell's new 12th generation PowerEdge servers, as well as Dell Compellent and EqualLogic storage and Dell Force10 networking. Read more...
Dell offers new laptops with Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Dell is expanding the range of laptops with Linux, with its new Precision mobile workstations being offered with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 OS as an option.
The company announced two models, the Precision M4700, which has a 15.6-inch screen, and the Precision M6700, which has a 17.3-inch screen. Dell will offer Windows 7, but is also offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 for specific regions. Dell did not provide information on the countries in which RHEL would be available.
The company over the last few years had scaled down its Linux offerings on laptops, saying the OS is targeted at specialist users. But Linux is staging a comeback on Dell's laptop, with the company planning to offer the XPS 13 thin-and-light laptop with Ubuntu 12.04, code-named Precise Pangolin, later this year. Dell is also pushing Linux to companies moving away from legacy Unix servers to industry standard servers. Read more...
Dell announces big storage for big data
Dell's announcement of a new Big Data Storage Data Retention product today highlights anew the company's ongoing transition from consumer hardware manufacturer to business service provider.
The company says that the solution runs best on its DX Object Storage Platform, combining the ability to sharply reduce the amount of data that needs to be stored via compression and deduplication with advanced management options.
"Being able to cost-effectively capture and store all of the relevant data makes it possible to gain insights that support innovation and business value. The key is having the right data management solution to fluidly move data, tier it, dedupe it, protect it and archive it. To us, that means your data is fluid," said Dell Enterprise Storage vice president and general manager Darren Thomas. Read more...
Dell’s partners fear divorce after firm beds new squeeze
CommVault and Symantec will be getting the jitters now that Dell is buying Quest, having acquired AppAssure and its continuous data protection technology just a few months back. Now it looks like the hardware giant is plumping up its portfolio of software with its latest acquisition... which might make its partnerships with the software firms redundant.
New acquisition Quest bought BakBone for $55m in November, 2010, gaining the NetVault product line and customer base. It joined Quest's application-specific LiteSpeed products, which cover databases like SQL Server and Oracle, its vRanger virtual server protection software and its Recovery Manager product line. These four products are being unified under a common NetVault XA architecture and management interface, which offers service-oriented data protection reporting, monitoring, alerting and control across an enterprise's multiple sites. This is usable by general line of business managers and IT people as well as specialised storage admin staff. Read more...
Dell announces ‘storage blades,’ converged data center strategy
At its annual storage conference, Dell today announced a storage array in a server blade form factor that can be combined with networking and server blades in a single chassis.
Each Dell EqualLogic PS-M4110 Blade Array comes in four models and can hold up to 14 drives for up to 14TB of data per array, up to 28TB per group (two blades) inside a blade chassis, and up to 56TB with two groups inside one blade chassis. The drives come with a native encryption option.
The Blade Arrays can be combined with the Dell PowerEdge M420 blade servers and Dell Force10 MXL switches in a Dell PowerEdge M1000e blade chassis to create a pre-tested and certified Converged Blade Data Center. Read more...
Red Hat, Dell announce OEM partnership
The announcement Tuesday of a new partnership between Dell and Red Hat could mark a further expansion of open-source software use in the enterprise.
OEM customers looking to Dell for custom products will now have additional open-source options. Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss join SUSE as standard choices for Dell OEM.
Red Hat's recently acquired status as the first billion-dollar open-source business underlines the importance of open technologies and their growing appeal to a wide variety of firms. Read more...
Dell announces first server with Intel’s Ivy Bridge Xeon chips
Dell on Tuesday announced a new microserver with Intel's first Xeon server processors based on the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture, which has not been officially announced by the chip maker yet.
Dell's PowerEdge C5220 is one of the first servers with Xeon chips based on the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture. The server is targeted at Web 2.0, cloud and high-performance applications, Dell said in a statement.
The server runs on Intel's Xeon E3-1200 V2 series processors, which are faster and more power-efficient than previous E3 chips based on the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture. Read more...
Geek deals: $437 off Dell laptop, docking station, and 20-inch monitor mega bundle
Business laptops can be boring. We understand your pain when your system breaks down and it’s time for a thick, hefty BlandBook, in a business-friendly color, with the mandatory optical drive, average about of RAM, and cost effective processor. Sometimes computers exist to get work done — you know it and we know it — but when you have to pick up a work computer, it makes sense to minimize the blandness and minimize the price, so as much many as possible can go back in your pocket. Read more...
Dell working on cloudy analytics apps
If you have a multi-billion dollar business selling servers and PCs directly to small and medium businesses, what happens when companies start shifting some of their computing needs to the cloud? You shift from being a manufacturer of IT gear to being a maker of cloudy systems and applications and a reseller of cloudy wares where you don't have products.
This is the ambitious plan that Dell has for its Cloud Business Applications division, which was created last August to focus solely on software-as-a-service applications and which is one of the units that John Swainson, the former head of CA Technologies and a software bigwig at Big Blue before that, is taking control of now that he is president of Dell's nascent software business. Read more...
Dell buys AppAssure for software backup
Dell said Friday it has purchased backup software vendor AppAssure, in the first of an expected run of acquisitions following Dell's appointment of former CA CEO John Swainson as head of a new software division.
Analysts have predicted that Swainson, a veteran IBM executive and former CEO of CA Technologies, will build out Dell's software portfolio with a focus on system management and cloud services, and the AppAssure deal seems to fit that profile. Read more...
Dell pulls back from netbook market
Dell has confirmed that it has ceased production of its Inspiron Mini netbook computer, in effect ending its pursuit of the receding netbook market, at least for consumer sales.
When Dell ran through its stock of the netbooks several months ago, it declined to manufacture more units, according to a Dell spokesman.
Instead the company is focusing its efforts in the mobile computing space on selling more powerful, yet still light, laptops, including an upcoming line of ultrabooks.
"We're committed to the highly portable space and have focused on delivering Thin + Powerful solutions, for which we've seen strong success, particularly in our XPS line," a company statement read, referencing the company's newly introduced XPS 15z and XPS 14z laptops. Read more...
Dell PowerEdge servers get AMD’s new 16-core chips
Dell on Tuesday said it has upgraded its PowerEdge servers with the just-released 16-core Opteron processors from AMD.
The company has upgraded the four-socket PowerEdge M915 blade server, which will be able to include up to 64 Opteron 6200 chip cores. The new servers will be faster than the M915 with the older 12-core Opteron 6100 chips.
AMD last week announced the availability of its first Opteron 6200 server processors, which carry the most cores available on x86 chips today. The chips, code-named Interlagos, are 25 percent to 30 percent faster than their 12-core predecessors. The new chips are based on the new Bulldozer processor architecture, which is also more power efficient. Read more...
Happy fifth birthday, cloud computing
In the vacuum between Hurricane Irene and Labor Day weekend, a major focus of the tech universe this week is on VMworld in Las Vegas.
It's here that the major and minor vendors are bringing out their latest virtualization and cloud offerings.
Dell Monday made one of the conference's bigger announcements by unveiling plans to launch a cloud infrastructure service based on VMware technology.
Dell's announcement arrives five years to the month after Amazon announced its Elastic Compute Cloud beta, or EC2, which may well have been the first service to call itself a cloud. Read more...