Three major IT companies announced new hardware, software and
services today to round out their individual and joint enterprise
ventures.
Executives with Dell, Intel
and Oracle discussed their ongoing relationship, this time
focusing on upcoming 4-way PowerEdge 6800 and PowerEdge 6850 servers powered by
64-bit Xeon processors that can run massive data center software like Oracle 10g and 10g RAC.
“This is a big step for our industry,” Jeff Clarke, senior vice
president at Dell, said during a conference call to the press. “We have
effectively lowered the barrier to entry for customers looking to deploy
a high-performance, four-processor server for database environments.”
Each company has their vested interest in making the partnership
work. Dell is trying to convince customers that several racks of
x86-based servers running non-proprietary software are less expensive
than operating huge Unix/RISC-based mainframes. Intel is saturating the
market with the message that its 64-bit Xeon family is ready to go.
Oracle is leveraging its relationship with Dell and Linux distributors
like Red Hat to promote its 10g and Database 9i
products.
Representatives with the three companies have also been on a 14-city
tour looking to convince customers to consolidate databases,
applications, servers and storage onto their common platforms.
The companies are also hoping to attract high-end data center
customers with the latest memory and interconnect technologies, such as
DDR2-400 ECC and PCI Express I/O.
“We are not done,” Abhi Talwalker, senior vice president and general
manager at Intel said. “There are a number of technologies that we are
working on that we still want to bring to this project, including dual
core architectures and virtualization.”
The partnership is also not completely exclusive. Jeff Clarke, senior vice president at Dell, said the company would validate its systems to
run Microsoft SQL Server 2005 using Microsoft Windows Server 2003 64-bit
Edition, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell’s SUSE Enterprise Linux
products later this year.
However, the door at Dell still seems shut for AMD .
Despite the past success of its x86 64-bit Opteron, Bruce Kornfeld,
director of worldwide enterprise marketing at Dell, told
internetnews.com talk about Intel’s rival are coming up less and
less conversations with customers.
“AMD in the server space is losing steam,” Kornfeld said citing
recent market surveys from research firm Gartner. “We are watching
market share and Intel is proving that it has what customers are asking
for.”
Preparing for the Grid
To augment its hardware, Dell also announced a new Data Center
Environmental Assessment service for data centers ranging from small (200
Square feet) to large (10,000+ square feet) environments. For a starting
price of $5,000, Dell’s experts will advise customers on airflow and
power requirement designs. The service is expected to launch in the
Americas and Europe later this year.
Dell also expanded the systems management features on its new
OpenManage 4.3 release. The software includes tools for single server
update (Server Update Utility), centralized hardware monitoring and
updates (IT Assistant 7.0) and remote hardware and software patch
management using software like Microsoft SMS 2003.
The assessment service and OpenManage are both buildups to Dell’s,
Intel’s and Oracle’s other enterprise venture called Project MegaGrid,
which is based in Austin, Texas. Originally launched in December, the aim of the project is to
describe reference architectures that can be used by customers. However,
Project MegaGrid itself is not described as a product delivered for
commercial sale by the companies.
Facing a perception that Project MegaGrid is a far cry from similar
grid projects coming out of IBM, HP
and Sun , Charles Rozwat, executive vice president at
Oracle said the Dell/Intel/Oracle trine is already a major force because
of its install base.
“We have a lot of customers that are already using grids in
production with about 4,000 customers committed to building better
products,” Rozwat said.
Dell’s Clarke added that the companies are working to expand the
128-node configuration to 256 nodes and beyond, as well as incorporating
provisioning technology.