Dell unveils surprisingly sexy servers

DELL IS NOT about to go gentle into that good night, and is reacting to market shifts by rivals HP, IBM and Cisco in the data centre space by releasing no less than 14 new business products, focusing on the lower, cheaper end of market.

The computer maker's latest offerings include some power-packing server systems bundled with outsourced management software and workstations based on Intel's next-generation (and as of yet unreleased) Nehalem processor.

As the scrap for corporate computing cash intensifies, Dell is having to push the boundaries of its safe and steady "industry-standard" servers, towards what it calls a "new strategy and enterprise portfolio designed to free customers from the restraints of costly and proprietary business technology."

What this means in plain, unspun English is that Dell can no longer afford to just bang out low-end servers. It will have to start following the likes of IBM and HP into the software and services bundle jungle.

Dell admits this freely and says it's planning to produce a system for managing data centre traffic, enabling the firm to not only assemble hardware, but also monitor and manage it.

The outfit reckons its new portfolio of will offer firms irresistible cost and time savings through purportedly improved efficiency, open standard infrastructure and, of course, buzzword of the year, virtualisation.

As well as new Nehalem based Poweredge servers, Dell is also showing off the fruits of its $1.4 billion acquisition of Equallogic with new storage arrays and software designed for IT management in a single console. The servers will ship starting Monday, after Intel formally announces the Nehalem EP.

Dell's ‘rude awakening' of sorts, has been delivered courtesy of a hefty kick up the Aris by Cisco, whose sudden move into the blade server space came just as HP decided to push further into networking. Stirring things up even further, the potential IBM takeover of Sun is also doing its bit to scare the bejusus out of the data centre ecosystem's main players.

Servers and networking products currently make up around 10 per cent of Dell's revenue, with services and storage chipping in to make up a further nine and four per cent respectively. This places the firm third in global server revenue after IBM and HP. µ