Dell has announced 14 new products as part of its attempt to gain ground in the server market, currently dominated by HP and IBM.
The products announced are: new Dell M-series blade servers; eleventh-generation PowerEdge servers; Precision workstations; EqualLogic PS6000 storage arrays; and a host of revamped services.
The fact that Dell has joined competitors in taking on the needs of enterprise IT departments holistically — instead of piecemeal — marks good progress, according to Frank Gillett, principal analyst at Forrester Research.
"They're getting much more competent at engineering things together; they're not thinking about storage and servers by themselves anymore," he said.
The move is part of the "new Dell," according to Brad Anderson, Dell's senior vice president in charge of enterprise products. Five years ago, Dell was primarily concerned with cost-efficient supply chains. Now, he says, the company sees "cost isn't just hardware and services, but the personnel around it".
To that end, Dell is stressing the services part of its new suite of products, designed to save time and money. For example, Dell has decided to extend its ImageDirect offering to servers. A server can come with the image preconfigured, nullifying the need for a company's in-house IT people to install each image manually.
It is a service Dell has previously offered for desktop and notebook PCs, but is "an interesting twist" to offer it on servers, said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT. It is also something that is likely to resonate with very large businesses.
"If you're buying a few dozen servers, it's not a big deal. If you're buying hundreds or thousands, that's where something like this can really make sense," said King.
But the real question is whether any of this will help Dell move ahead of competition. There is a lot of ground to make up. According to IDC's most recent tally of the x86 server landscape, HP has just over 58 percent of the blade market, compared to IBM's 22 percent and Dell's 9.8 percent. Dell is slightly closer in its race in rack-mounted servers, with 27.1 percent of the market, just behind the leader, HP, which has 39.6 percent.
Anderson says there is still time to catch up. While Dell is starting to gain some ground in Europe and Asia, he said, there is much more to do. "It's a multi-year endeavour to catch up to HP in servers in Europe. It won't happen overnight."
In the meantime, Gillett of Forrester says Dell is at least keeping pace with its competitors. "They're keeping up, but it's not clear that they're pulling ahead," he said.
For this new generation of servers, Dell is the first to lay its cards on the table. Not until IBM, HP and Sun show their hands, likely after Intel unveils the Nehalem-based Xeon processors for servers, can a full assessment be made.
The timing of the product introduction may appear to be less than ideal: IT spending is expected to grow just 2.6 percent this year, according to IDC. But Dell is counting on customers that have no choice but to increase their datacentre capacity or replace broken and outdated equipment. As Anderson noted, employees need to be able to send email, and a company's compliance obligations cannot be neglected just because the stock market is down.
Gillett of Forrester questioned whether there is ever a right or wrong time to introduce updated servers. "One of our own clients said every year is a recession in IT. They said, 'This [economy] is nothing different for us. We always have to do a lot more with less.'"
The storage arrays and workstations are available from Wednesday, while the servers will not be available until the following week.
