By James Niccolai, IDG News
Dell hopes to expand its role in data centers beyond that of a low-cost hardware provider by offering a set of products for managing a virtual infrastructure.
Through acquisitions, partnerships and some of its own development work, Dell has been assembling a set of software products called the Virtual Integrated System, which it says will make it easier for companies to provision and manage both physical and virtual servers, networks and storage.
It’s a new area for Dell, and one that requires the company to compete with vendors that have more experience selling complex software. But the company is keen to reduce its dependence on commodity hardware and generate more money from software and services, which tend to yield higher profits.
Dell positions VIS as a competitor to Cisco Systems’ Unified Computing System and Hewlett-Packard’s Blade System Matrix. It first talked about VIS at an industry analyst event in March and is now marketing it more aggressively. On Wednesday it released some new and updated components.
VIS aims to help companies virtualize their data centers to create a pool of computing resources, in which workloads can be moved around to accommodate spikes in demand. VIS sits above the core virtualization platforms from VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, and is supposed to help customers manage their servers, networking and storage as a more cohesive whole.