Dell goes up to Eleven

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

A briefing this week from Dell, which has started down the path pioneered by IBM, in retreating further away from hardware sales and tentatively towards various methods of consulting for businesses.

The company wanted you to hear about its pre-virtualisation check, done entirely remotely. It wanted to pass on the news about its new smaller business servers – T400 and T710 – which are decently configured for VMware and Hyper-V, and made a point of mentioning its next-generation remote management card, which will update drivers and patches for you as they are announced.

I’m writing this at some speed, just after the end of its embargo period, though to be perfectly honest I couldn’t see any Big Secrets being let out of the bag. When I asked the questions that PC Pro is getting a bit of a reputation for, about how Dell’s remote access services would be legally defined to protect the client’s data and help to disclose exactly where the team of consultants furtling round your servers, are based… then I got a few simple, honest ‘don’t knows’.

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Is the world really going virtual?

Monday, May 18th, 2009

According to our sister site Channel Pro the number of virtual machines is set to outnumber their physical counterparts during 2009. There’s a caveat to that: we’re talking servers rather than desktop systems, but it’s still an amazing statistic. (more…)