IT Expert Voice

Disaster recovery used to be exhausting. Even worse, despite complicated and herculean efforts, enterprise disaster recovery seldom totally restored current data intact. Then virtualization came along. While not a total fix to DR dilemmas, virtualization forever changed the rocky DR landscape into something more maneuverable.

“For the most part, this change was positive; hardware abstraction, Layer 1 network abstraction, centrally stored configurations, and system relativity (single solution for an environment able to be recovered in unison) all improved a company’s ability to recover their infrastructure,” explains Gregory L. Smith, senior product architect at Disaster Recovery (DR) vendor SunGard Availability Services.

Beyond improved data retrieval, another top advantage to virtualization use in DR is its bankability. The return on investment (ROI) on DR efforts typically climbs in proportion to virtualization use – if for no other reason than critical systems can be brought back up on less hardware.

But there are other time and cost savings as well. READ MORE

Dell enterprise customers face similar desktop-deployment challenges worldwide: High-volume desktop deployment and migration can be complicated and disruptive. An enterprise’s network infrastructure that capably supports daily operations typically cannot handle the increased demands of a deployment. Moreover, deploying to remote branches and employees is problematic because of limited bandwidth and other network constraints.

Many companies don’t realize their maximum ROI (return on investment) on high-volume desktop deployment because predicting and controlling costs is difficult. Deployment is a non-strategic IT function that requires burst capacity (extra labor and resources required for a short time) that often results in expensive, selective sourcing. Also, it’s been a traditionally labor intensive process lacking real innovation. For example, most companies maintain multiple hardware-specific and line-of-business (LOB) images along with hundreds, if not thousands, of applications—all at a high cost. Although tools are available to reduce the time and costs associated with high-volume desktop deployment, many companies aren’t able to take advantage of these tools because they have not fully rationalized their infrastructure.

Dell Automated Deployment addresses the disruptive nature and high cost of high-volume desktop deployment. This white paper describes how Dell Automated Deployment addresses these challenges, as well as provides the rationale for each solution.

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