Dell boosts virtual management with expanded VIS suite
Dell expanded its Virtual Integrated System architecture on Wednesday with the launch of one new product and the announcement of a further two.
The company launched the Virtual Integrated System (VIS) Self-Service Creator and gave further details of the complementary products VIS Director and Integration Suite, which will become available in the first quarter of 2011. The move is part of Dell's overall unified management strategy for the datacentre, which was kicked off last year with the launch of the Advanced Infrastructure Manager (AIM).
"Dell's VIS architecture ... works with a customer's existing architecture and their current products and investments — whether from Dell or another provider," Brad Anderson, senior vice president for Dell's enterprise product group, said in a statement.
The VIS Self-Service Creator product is a provisioning catalogue for IT applications and resources to go out across templates for use on virtual machines. It is designed for administrators in charge of multi-vendor hardware and software portfolios and has analytical capabilities to look at the amount of resources being consumed by applications. It will at some point gain a management console, which will be integrated with both VMware and Microsoft hypervisor management tools. Dell are in discussions with Citrix for compatibility as well, Ed English, head of enterprise marketing for Dell in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, told ZDNet UK.
"The rogue server under the desk is morphing into the public cloud. This can be abused if proper governance isn't in place," English said.
The next complementary product slated for launch is the VIS Director, which will analyse template usage over time and anticipate future usage. It will have automation elements and will be able to increase and decrease load size on a usage basis for individual templates. It too will have its own management console.
The Integration Suite will amalgamate AIM, Self-Service Creator and Director into one unified management console. The VIS portfolio heightens the competition between Dell, Cisco, Hitachi Data Systems and HP for control of the virtualisation management market.
VIS Self-Service Creator licences are priced in the US from $1,495 (£944) per socket, with support services adding an additional $329 per socket. UK pricing has not yet been announced.