Dell Refreshes Optiplex Line, Offers Atom-based Thin Client

Dell planned to refresh its line of Optiplex desktops on Tuesday with 10 new models, including a thin-client computer based on Intel's Atom processor. The company will also expand the availability of its Flexible Computing and Managed Desktop services, now available in the U.S., to customers in other markets.
Dell's latest products arrive at a difficult time, with markets roiled by fears of a global recession and companies cutting back on expenses in the face of expected weaker demand. Dell isn't immune. The company warned last month that end-user demand had softened in the U.S., as well as in parts of Europe and Asia. But Dell said its latest products can help companies cut their IT costs -- provided companies are willing to invest capital in new computers.
"These machines do consume less power than what's out there in the infrastructure today. With depreciation cycles of four or five years, those aging desktop machines out there are costing customers more money," said Jeff Clarke, senior vice president of Dell's Business Product Group, in a phone interview.
The updated Optiplex range and the broader availability of Dell's Flexible Computing and Managed Desktop services reflects Dell's desire to offer its customers more than just hardware.
"It's a signal of where Dell is going, this notion of hardware, software and services integrated together to bring a solution to the market place," Clarke said.
The Atom-based Optiplex FX160 thin client is priced starting from US$399 and was designed to complement Dell services, like its On-Demand Desktop Streaming offering for customers.
The FX160 gives customers another option when deciding how they want to run their systems, Clarke said, adding that Dell has long sold third-party thin clients to its customers. "We really believe in flexibility and not coming in and saying that the only way to do it is have a virtual client, or the only way to do it is a thin client," he said.
The Atom's capabilities are well suited to a thin client, where the horsepower of Intel's mainstream processors aren't necessary. "The types of applications that are being deployed in call centers and point-of-sale locations are very single, or in some cases dual, application-based and the Atom processor has sufficient horsepower to do one or two applications in parallel," Clarke said.
Introduced in June, Atom has been a runaway success and Intel has worked hard to keep pace with fast-growing demand, leading some computer makers to grumble about product shortages. But Dell won't face that problem. "I won't have a supply issue," he said.
Besides the FX160, other models in the new desktop lineup include the Optiplex 960, 760 and 360. These systems will be available in a range of form factors and are priced starting from $863, $593 and $476, respectively.

Reference : http://www.pcworld.com/article/152910/.html?tk=rss_news

Dell Unwraps Products Designed for Virtualization

Dell is continuing to push its image as a provider of simple-to-use IT products, but it also may be trying to move upmarket, with a number of announcements designed around virtualization.
On Wednesday, Dell introduced two blade servers, support for more capacity in its storage products, and new partnerships with companies that offer virtualization management products and services. The news is tied to a Monday announcement of support for Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization software.
The PowerEdge M805 and M905 blades were designed from scratch with virtualization in mind, said Sally Stevens, director of server platform marketing at Dell, speaking on a conference call last week to discuss the announcements. The M805 is a two-socket AMD blade with 16 DIMMs (dual in-line memory modules); the M905 is a four-socket AMD blade with 24 DIMMs.
The blades are power-efficient and offer more DIMMs than do comparable servers from Hewlett-Packard, Stevens said. The M805 will cost US$1,699, and the M905 will start at $4,999.
Dell also announced it will support Citrix Xenserver out of the box on its EqualLogic PS series of storage arrays. "When you get your Xen license and hook it up to an array, it's ready to go," said Praveen Asthana, director of worldwide storage marketing for Dell.
IT departments will be able to buy a new storage array from Dell that supports more data. The new PS5500E, also being introduced on Wednesday, can handle 576 T bytes using a single management interface.
Customers getting into virtualization for the first time, and current virtualization users who want to better manage the process, will also see expanded help from Dell. The company is partnering with Vizioncore to offer backup and restore capabilities tuned for virtualized environments, and is also teaming up with PlateSpin to offer optimization and lifecycle management services.
Dell will also offer a version of its Auto-Snapshot Manager that is compatible with VMware. The manager is designed to help protect virtual machines and let users do things such as restore individual virtual machines, rather than having to restore them all even if only one is needed.
The announcements appear in line with Dell's attempts to make it easier for companies to use virtualization. "Dell is still very suited for that customer looking to open up the box when it comes in the door and have virtualization," said Mark Bowker, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group.
Simplifying installation and use may particularly appeal to small or medium-size businesses, which tend to be the budget-conscious organizations that are attracted to Dell products, he said. By comparison, Dell competitors HP and IBM have the reputation of offering a broader selection of products and services for large data centers, he said.
Dell has generally had a reputation as the cheap option, agreed Michael Cote, an analyst with Redmonk. But over the past couple of years, Dell has been working toward dispelling that cheap image. "Paying more attention to things like virtualization and offering more than just a box would probably help them out along those lines," he said.
In addition, the new blades and storage array have more capabilities and so could appeal to larger companies.
Dell joins others, such as HP, Microsoft and BMC Software, making virtualization announcements in the run-up to VMware's annual VMworld conference, kicking off Sept। 15.
Reference : http://www.pcworld.com/article/151012/.html?tk=rss_news

Dell Unveils 19-hour Latitude Laptop

Dell on Tuesday announced a series of Latitude laptops, including its lightest ultramobile commercial laptop yet and a larger system that the company claimed provides 19 hours of battery life.
The company's Latitude E6400 runs for as much as 10 hours on a single nine-cell battery, and an additional battery that snaps on to the bottom of the laptop adds as much as nine hours of battery life, Dell officials said at a press event in San Francisco. That gives users close to a full day of laptop use without carrying an AC adapter to recharge the batteries.
Dell has developed proprietary technology to boost battery life in the laptop, said Jeff Clarke, senior vice president and general manager at Dell. The technology focuses on making components suck less power from the battery, Clarke said. For example, the refresh rate of a screen is reduced under certain conditions. Dell needed to develop related software and work with component manufacturers to enable these capabilities.
The company has also added those power-saving features to other Latitude models, but a Dell spokesman wouldn't say whether they would also be available on the Inspiron line of consumer laptops. The battery life was measured using standard industry benchmarks, Dell officials said.
The Latitude E6400 comes with a 14.1-inch screen and runs an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. It can have as much as 8G bytes of RAM and 250G bytes of storage. The system comes preloaded with Windows Vista, with an option to downgrade to Windows XP. It is priced starting at US$1,139. The Latitude E6500, a similar laptop with a larger screen, was also announced, starting at $1,169. Both systems are available immediately.
Dell has also added some other power-related enhancements to new laptops and said it would offer a smaller and lighter AC adapter that enables batteries to recharge more quickly. Some of the new Latitudes will also be able to recharge consumer electronics, such as a cell phone, via USB (Universal Serial Bus) without the laptop being switched on, according to the company.
In addition, Dell announced new ultraportable laptops, including the Latitude E4200, which the company said is its smallest and lightest commercial laptop to date. It comes with a 12.1-inch screen and weighs just under 2.2 pounds (1 kilogram). Another ultraportable, the Latitude E4300, has a 13.3-inch screen and weighs 3.3 pounds. Both are powered by Intel Core 2 Duo ultra-low voltage (ULV) processors running between 1.40GHz and 2.40GHz. Pricing information has not been announced, but the laptops will be available in the coming weeks, a Dell spokesman said.
Future ultramobile Latitudes could feature Dell's On technology, with which users will be able to access the Web, e-mail messages and contacts without loading the operating system, the company said. Dell previewed the technology at the event but didn't give complete details.
Dell rounded out Tuesday's announcements with budget and semi-rugged Latitude laptops. The E5400 and E5500 laptops, available immediately, come with a variety of screen sizes, with prices starting at $839. The semi-rugged E6400 ATG laptop, which meets the U.S. Army's standards to withstand dust and humidity, will be available next week starting at $2,399.
Dell has seen its laptop shipments grow since it signed up retailers worldwide to sell them, a move away from its Web-based sales model। It is the second-largest PC retailer behind HP, shipping 11.56 million units in the second quarter for a 16.4 percent market share, according to IDC. That represented a 21.4 percent year-over-year increase, IDC said.
Reference : http://www.pcworld.com/article/149743/2008/08/.html?tk=rss_news

Dell Shrinks the Desktop With Studio Hybrid

Dell on Tuesday introduced an ultra-small desktop that the company says is 80 percent smaller than standard minitower desktops.
The Studio Hybrid mini-desktop also uses 70 percent less power than a typical desktop, the company claimed. (See our first impressions in the Today@PCWorld blog).
Space is at a premium these days, so the goal behind Hybrid was to make it fit anywhere in an office or home, Dell said in a press release.
The Hybrid will run Intel's Pentium dual-core and Core 2 Duo processors, and support up to 4G bytes of RAM and up to 320G bytes of hard drive storage. It will also include Gigabit Ethernet and optional wireless networking. It will come preloaded with the Windows Vista OS.
An optional Blu-ray DVD drive will become available in August. The dimensions were not immediately available.
Priced starting at US$499, Dell will first sell the desktop through its Web site. With a monitor, prices will start at $689. It will come in six colors and be available through retailers later this year.
This is not Dell's first entry into the mini-desktop space. It already offers the XPS One all-in-one PC.
Though it doesn't deliver workstation-class performance, the desktop is useful for home buyers who don't need mobility and high-performance systems, said Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates. The Hybrid contains mostly notebook components, Kay said.
"It could be visually more interesting and ... unobtrusive. Since it's small, you can just hide it," Kay said.
There are lots of possibilities for ultra-small desktops like Dell's Studio Hybrid, Kay said. In the future it could double as a media center in living rooms while being hidden away in a cabinet.
As the dominance of minitower gradually declines, the demand for small-form factor and all-in-one PCs is rising। By 2015, demand for all-in-one and small form-factor PCs will overtake minitowers, Kay said.
Reference : http://www.pcworld.com/article/149061/2008/07/.html?tk=rss_news

Dell Adds Storage, Disaster Management Services to Portfolio

Dell on Monday announced it was adding customizable storage and disaster management services to build out its services portfolio, which it began revamping last year.
The services, which include disaster recovery and data backup services, will offer tools and consulting for customers to meet exploding data storage requirements across multiple networking and hardware environments, the company said.
Dell has done occasional storage and disaster recovery consulting, but this is the first time these services are being pulled together as an offering to customers worldwide, said Paul Kaeley, global practice leader at Dell.
Two levels of disaster recovery will be offered to customers. The first level, for mid-size consumers, will protect data around key applications and provide tools to restore IT operations in case of a disaster. A higher service level targeted at larger customers will include the design and implementation of IT disaster recovery plans through tools and aligning more people to ensure the plan is effectively implemented.
Dell is also offering managed backup services with reporting and monitoring services to stabilize data backup. If a backup system goes astray, Dell is offering a managed backup through remote management. The services will span all storage offerings, including EMC storage resold by Dell.
The tiered storage service will categorize high and low-priority data to different storage levels to help a company cut costs.
The price and size of the services will be proportional to the size and complexity of the environment, Kaeley said.
Part of Dell's effort to "simplify IT," the service upgrades reflect Dell's push to reduce IT maintenance costs via customized hardware, software and services. Dell has acquired companies like MessageOne and Everdream to boost its remote management portfolio.
Dell has also been under increased pressure to improve its service offerings in the wake of Hewlett-Packard's acquisition of services company Electronic Data Systems in May. Analysts have said that EDS gives HP a leg up over Dell in the global services market.
Through its services, Dell does not want to send consultants to sit on a client's site for months only to create a 600-page report, Kaeley said. Dell intends to customize services and solve problems quickly through speedy data collection and reporting, Kaeley said.
The days of services and support being a simple break-fix maintenance are over; as computing systems get sophisticated, the need for remote diagnostic check and triage has increased. Dell has been at the forefront of the effort through its acquisitions and increase service focus, with companies like HP and IBM headed in that direction, said Ron Silliman, principal analyst at Gartner.
The new services may not affect Dell's relationship with channel partners that want to have Dell's brand name attached to product delivery. However, some partners may feel ambivalent as Dell's sudden jump into the space could undercut their support business, Silliman said.
Dell is tying up with companies like GlassHouse Technologies to provide the new services to customers.
"Dell is somewhat like Wal-Mart -- its the best thing and the worst thing -- you get a whole volume of business, but Dell expects a whole level of performance and more cost control।"
Reference : http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/147538/dell_adds_storage_disaster_management_services_to_portfolio.html