Dell: Keep It Simple, Keep It Green

SAN FRANCISCO—Following in the footsteps of other speakers at Oracles OpenWorld conference, Dell Chairman and CEO Michael Dell stressed the need to simplify IT and push for more energy-efficient products.

Dell has had its share of announcements this week, from a partnership with Sun Microsystems that puts Suns Solaris and OpenSolaris operating systems on Dell PowerEdge servers to enhancements to Dells OpenManage product in the upcoming release of version 5.3. In his keynote Nov. 14, Dell took things further as he and company Chief Technology Officer Kevin Kettler highlighted a number of technologies and services from Dell aimed at increasing flexibility, easing deployment and cutting costs.

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Among those services is Image Direct, a software-as-a-service Web application tool that allows customers to develop their own custom PC images and upload them to Dell to be installed on the machines they purchase. The idea is to ease the sometimes-tedious process of image management, Dell said.

"For Dell, our top priority is to tackle complexity head on," he said. "By simplifying your client infrastructure, were simplifying your data center and were launching services to assess complexity and simplify your environment. Simplifying IT is the best way that we can deliver value to our customers, and it guarantees that your future computing will be simple, virtual, more connected and most importantly, it will be greener."

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Dell noted that servers today are asked to handle billions of transactions every day.

"This puts an infinite demand on servers, and that will be an infinite demand on energy, and this means we have to be smarter about power consumption and a lot more conscious about the power our data centers require," he said.

To that end, Dell said his company will be carbon-neutral by 2008, and Kettler claimed the companys next-generation blade technology will be 23 percent more energy efficient than similarly configured blades from competitors Hewlett-Packard and IBM.

"The way I see it, the future must be green, from the technology itself to the way we manage it we must do better," Dell said. "To help you get there, youll see us introduce a reference architecture in the next year that not only helps determine how green you are today but also helps you create a plan for making your organization more green going forward. We call it your green print. Dell will be carbon-neutral by the end of 2008."

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