Dell to Acquire Data Center Automation Specialist Scalent Systems

Dell is adding an important ingredient to its data center management software recipe. The company announced July 1 that it is acquiring automation software vendor Scalent Systems, which provides shortcuts intended to make data center infrastructure easier and more efficient to operate.

Dell will integrate Scalent's V/OE (Virtual Operating Environment) into its AIM (Advanced Infrastructure Manager) control software. V/OE allows IT administrators to manipulate all the elements in the data center from a single Web-based console, provisioning and reprovisioning them as needed.

Dell did not reveal the terms of the transaction and said it expects to complete the acquisition within the next few months.

In September 2009, Dell revealed that it was partnering with Scalent and networking specialist Brocade Communications Systems to develop a unified data center offering to compete with those from rivals such as Cisco Systems and Hewlett-Packard.

The successful original partnership with Scalent revolved around V/OE, which automates routine workloads and provides real-time management of data center resources at will. Now Dell will have that key product inside its own firewall instead of having to license it.

Dell, the world's best-selling personal computer maker, has lately been shifting more of its attention to the data center infrastructure sector. Currently Dell is in the process of producing a cloud storage appliance with Microsoft and Seagate i365. In February, Dell acquired application virtualization software maker Kace to improve overall performance.

In April, Dell struck a deal with enterprise management software maker Egenera to make available that company's PAN Manager 6.0, an open-standards, cross-platform control center for converged infrastructures. It remains to be seen whether Dell also will want to acquire Egenera.

On June 9, Dell announced a major refresh of most of its data center hardware products.

Dell's AIM enables a single administrator to allocate compute, storage and network resources for physical and virtual application workloads on the fly, if needed.

Because Scalent's V/OE adds an open-standards software-based approach to managing virtual infrastructures, IT managers will be able to better integrate existing data center control applications into a virtualized Dell system.