Dell on Monday announced plans to expand its partnership with storage vendor EMC by supporting EMC subsidiary VMware's ESX Server, VMotion and VirtualCenter Management Server software on certain configurations of Dell's server and storage systems.
Effective Monday, Dell customers will be able to purchase pre-tested 2- and 4-processor configurations of the PowerEdge 6650 server with either the Clariion CX300 or CX500 storage systems running the software. Dell will now handle the first level of support calls for the VMware products, with more complex level 2 and level 3 support calls still being handled by VMware.
"We think this hits the sweet spot of a configuration that most Dell customers can implement most quickly," said Mike Mullany, the vice president of marketing with VMware, a Palo Alto, California, software company that EMC acquired in January.
VMware makes virtualization software that allows one application to run on a large number of servers. VMware's software can also let one physical server operate many different "virtual" operating systems at the same time.
The partnership helps Dell compete with companies like Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM Corp., which have sizable in-house software development teams and are pushing software virtualization as an important component of their hardware strategies. "It's really very important to Dell to put together these relatively deep partnerships in software because Dell has essentially no assets of its own and really no intention of developing assets of its own" said Gordon Haff, an analyst with the Illuminata Inc. research firm, based in Nashua, New Hampshire.
Because Microsoft Corp.'s upcoming Virtual Server 2004 software competes with VMware's products, Monday's news also says something about Dell and Microsoft, Haff said. "Dell apparently does not intend to be exclusively locked into Microsoft as a management software partner, but is looking at other players as well," he said.
Microsoft began sending out beta copies of Virtual Server 2004 to testers last month. The company expects to begin shipping the product, which is based on software Microsoft acquired from Connectix Corp. in 2003, by mid-year.
At present, Dell sells, but does not support the smaller-scale version of VMware's virtualization software, called GSX Server, that is expected to compete directly with Virtual Server 2004, Mullany said. "(Dell) resells GSX server, but it's not considered as strategic for them," he said.
During a conference call Monday, Dell Product Group Vice President of Software Pete Morowski declined to comment on Dell's plans for Virtual Server 2004, other than to say that his company would respond to customer needs.
A supported two-processor PowerEdge 6650 server with ESX Server can be purchased from Dell, effective Monday, for US$30,579.