Dell’s vision 2009: To change the economics of Indian IT infrastructure

[nandagopal]

Recently Dell announced its latest initiatives and vision for 2009 in a selective media brief held in Bangalore addressed by Pallab Talukdar, Director of Enterprise Business, Dell India. The key highlights were the launch of Dell enterprise solution centre in Bangalore, how to bring data centre efficiencies through virtualization and latest developments in it's portfolio of servers, storage and services.



Talking on the data centre challenges, Talukdar said that 70% of the IT budget worldwide is spent on maintenance and rest 30% on innovation and other stuff. Dell plans to bring down 70% on maintenance to around 55%. It's vision for next 18-36 months is to reduce hardware costs upto 50% with the help of virtualization, decrease data centre space and increase performance by up to 97% with energy efficient IT.



Energy consumption in data centers is accelerating like never before. Talukdar says there are four parts to it- power for hardware, power for cooling, power for servers and power delivery. To meet the energy consumption efficiently, the IT departments of companies should focus more on hardware and cooling aspects than the servers and power delivery. Dell has tied up with Emerson and a few others to achieve energy efficiency at data centre level. "I would also recommend the CIOs to replace the servers that are 2-3 years old," said Talukdar.



Most of the CIOs today want to avoid investing on their current IT infrastructure due to the economic crisis. The current demand is maximizing their existing resources and increasing efficiencies at minimum costs. In such a scenario, virtualization is a very helpful technology to achieve efficiency and lower TCO.
Explains Talukdar, "If a company has 200 servers now, its best time to virtualize so that later when the business grows, the company need not add 100 more servers to its IT infrastructure. Our suggestion to the CIOs is that capacity is already hidden in your datacenter, you need to rationalize that and reduce cost upto 50%."



There have been a lot of hullaballoo on virtualization in the past few years but there is still a very slow growth in terms of adoption. But Dell is very optimist about virtualization picking up very soon in India. According to Talukdar, in the past 6 months there have been large deployments around virtualization technologies in production houses and now its time for virtualization becoming main stream technology in India.