Dell Networking Solutions

Dell Networking

Solutions

The challenge: network complexity & inflexibility can impact your business

Too many layers, devices, and operating systems make management needlessly complex. Deployment is disruptive, provisioning is slow, environmental costs are high, and scaling the network to meet ever-changing business requirements is a constant challenge. All this costs money. Today, 80 percent of most companies’ IT budgets is spent not moving ahead, but simply keeping up.

The typical legacy network is unwieldy to manage and inefficient to operate. Multiple layers of unnecessary switches add to the complexity without providing any real advantage. Existing networks have become too complex, too slow, too expensive, and far too inflexible to support the business. They simply can’t cope with the onslaught of ever more users, devices, locations, and cloud-based applications. Many vendors would advise you to start over and rebuild the network from the ground up. But “ripping and replacing” is not the best answer.

Dell Networking Solutions

It has always been true that the profitability of a business is directly correlated with the ability for the organization to satisfy a customer need. With technology influencing and advancing our daily lives in profound ways, businesses have also come to rely on technology to contribute to its success. And with new challenges facing the business, the network has taken center stage and grown to play a vital role in the ultimate survival or failure of the business. We simply cannot survive without it.

Regardless of business size, vertical or location, businesses have embraced the concept of virtualization. Applications have been migrated from laptops to the “cloud” and this has put additional demands on the network; in many cases these demands were never factored into network design when it was first architected. The result — added complexity and cost resulting in a network that never fully met the demands of the business and the organizations bottom-line suffered.

In today’s highly competitive business environment, businesses have to become more agile and flexible to keep up. The result is a mobile workforce that demands ubiquitous and secure access to all applications from virtually anywhere on any device. These business requirements place incredible demands on the network. Perhaps the most impacted portion of the network is the datacenter, the “center of gravity” for the entire organization, whether at the campus or at a remote facility; whether on a corporate issued device or a personal smartphone. This extreme departure from “the way business was done in the past” also demanded a new approach to networking. This is where Dell comes in with the concept of a Virtual Network Services Infrastructure (VNSI).

Virtual network services infrastructure

Anytime, anywhere connectivity is no longer enough. Today, almost every business must flawlessly support a more heterogeneous audience on more devices in more locations. Cloud based initiatives deliver centrally managed and secured business critical applications while concurrently delivering a “LAN like” user experience to the extended user base which are constantly mobile or in the cloud themselves.

In order to accomplish all of this Dell has developed its networking technology using Virtual Network Services Infrastructure (VNSI) which is based on three key tenets:

• Improve performance and reduce complexity by simplifying the network.

• Focus on the applications that help support the business by managing from the edge.

• Deploy a strategic platform that is optimized for scalability and continued growth with an open system architecture.

Dell recognizes that the increased competitive environment combined with a highly mobile workforce accessing cloud based applications is redefining not just technology but the way business is done. We are a driving force in helping enterprises achieve their full potential: real-time and secure information exchange and connectedness without compromise.

The business/technology gap

What can Dell networking solutions do for you?

Dell provides

At the data center

• A dynamically scaled network to meet virtualization needs for all locations

•Cost effective performance to meet heavy converged video, voice and data

•Open architecture enabling network agility without disruption due to rip and replace

At the campus

• Automated Network

•Heterogeneous audience support

• Support for resource heavy cloud based applications

At the branch

• Reliable anywhere access

• Secure role based access

• LAN like performance regardless of location

Dell Networking Solutions

How is Dell networking different?

Simple to deploy and manage

• Less hardware, fewer hops, and fewer touchpoints mean streamlined operations

• Advanced services frees your staff to innovate

Open standards-based solutions

• Enabling you to take back your strategy

• Leveraging your existing infrastructure and training investments

No technology or vendor “lock-in”

• Augment rather than “rip and replace”

• Build for tomorrow on what you already have

Extensible and scalable

• Supports your current initiatives

• Scales to meet your new requirements and traffic flows as requirements evolve

Dell’s approach: simplify and streamline

Dell can help you address your current challenges while also reducing costs, streamlining cumbersome processes, and improving performance. We help you:

• Streamline your network: By reducing the number of layers and “boxes” in your network topology, you can achieve a smaller footprint, lowering both capital and operational expenses.

• Access the experts: Staging and deploying new technology in a production environment can be costly and disruptive. Accessing Dell’s advanced services provides you with peace of mind and ensures flawless scoping, architecting, training, deployment, maintenance and much more from start to finish. It also frees you up to strategize and innovate rather than manage which does not contribute to the bottom-line.

Manage from the edge

In most organizations, the greatest assets and expenditures are people. Assigning people to mundane and tedious tasks saps the organization of innovation that could be occurring. To achieve greater control and agility it is essential to deploy a better, more automated method of management by moving intelligence near the edge, closer to workloads. This enables dynamic provisioning management and control without the tedious manual intervention traditionally required of such networks.

With an optimized network and management at the edge, it is easy to identify underutilized areas anywhere in the network and balance workloads across the network thereby optimizing performance without over consuming resources.

Figure 1. A simplified network streamlines operations

Wide area network (WAN)

interface

Traditional network designConsolidated network design

with virtualized access

Tier 3: Core

Tier 2: Aggregation

Tier 1: Access

Virtual chassis

Servers

Deploy a platform for the future

Many networking vendors offer products that are “closed”–meaning that they function only with that vendor’s technology. Many customers that have purchased such technologies realize only years after that they are locked into a technology that may not scale and cannot operate in a multi-vendor environment. In such instances, the corporate strategy becomes completely reliant on the vendors strategy. And once locked in, the vendor does not have to innovate and does not even have to be competitive on price. The result is that any technology change out or additional business requirements that impact the network requires a disruptive and costly rip and replace. Dell’s open and innovative networking solutions enable you to augment your existing infrastructure without lock-in or rip and replace. We offer open computing for flawless application delivery, open networking which delivers on our VNSI vision and open storage which enables fluid data store and recall. Our comprehensive networking solution portfolio gives you freedom of choice and Dell expertise to select your optimal solution.

Dell networking solution is forward thinking and takes the “big picture” into account. Dell will help you deploy a platform for forward compatibility. Because we build our solutions on open standards, you can take back your strategy from proprietary vendors and avoid lock-in to “yesterday’s solution.”

Learn more at Dell.com/networking

© 2011 Dell Inc. All Rights Reserved. BRO_009_Network_Solutions _032811_100511

DellNetworkSolutionelements

Solution components products

Dell PowerConnect Family

The PowerConnect family offers a set of flexible, manageable and comprehensive switch solutions supporting up to 10 Gigabit Ethernet and optimized iSCSI performance with Dell Storage solutions, ideal for enterprise and campus LAN environments alike.

Dell Force10 Family

Datacenter solutions consisting of open, standards-based, networking, hardware and software. The family consists of the C-Series, designed to support mission critical applications with very low latency across converged networks, the S-Series Top-of-Rack platforms that deliver core resiliency to the network edge, and the multi-terabit fixed-configuration and chassis-based Z-Series Core platform.

PowerConnect W-Series Access Points and Controller products

Extending the Enterprise network beyond the datacenter, and into distributed enterprise and branch environments with full 802.11abgn support for APs and centralized management Controllers which reduce configuration setup and deployment to enable secure productivity and mobility.

PowerConnect M-Series Blade Servers

Dell PowerEdge M-Series blade servers and enclosures offer a flexible platform for managing physical, virtual, and logical infrastructures. The modular blade enclosures are designed to provide a flexible infrastructure that accelerates delivery of strategic IT services by combining high density with innovative power and cooling, exceptional manageability, and integrated connectivity for virtually any network, storage, or management environment.

Services

At Dell, services aren’t an afterthought or an aside. They’re an integral part of our solutions. Dell’s spectrum of networking services includes:

Consulting

Workshops to share best practices, paid assessments to make recommendations and design network topology, protocol, and architecture to meet requirements, fault tolerance, and redundancy.

Managed Services

24x7 network management service operates, administers, maintains and provisions all networked systems to ensure seamless operation in compliance with performance service level agreements.

Implementation

Deploys new tailored network solutions and maximize the potential of existing networks and integrate, and optimize with network management tools in support of the global network operations.

Support

Technical, warranty and product support services that reduce the cost and complexity of owning and supporting Dell networking devices to maintain compliance and uptime.

Campus switching PowerConnect

Data center switching DellForce10

Wireless PowerConnectWSeries

Blade I/O M-Series

Datacenter

Campus Branch Mobile

Figure 2: A distributed user base places increased demand on the network infrastructure