Dell partners with Cisco & Xsigo in the battle of the data center

10-02-2009

Tuesday, 03 February 2009 - Dell has been positioning itself over the past few years to become a bigger player in the data center market. Dell currently provides services and products to assist data center end users. Dell continues its positioning with two partnerships that they hope will continue to push their brand into the data center.
Dell and Cisco have expanded on an existing partnership in a bid to help customers more easily manage data center infrastructures in a virtual environment. Dell and Cisco have announced a Solution Technology Integrator agreement that will integrate their Nexus 5020 switches to its PowerEdge server and EqualLogic, PowerVault and Dell/EMC storage systems.

The combined platform is designed to help customers simplify the management of next-generation data centers by pooling storage and computing resources over a unified networking fabric. This consolidates local area network, storage area network (SAN) and server cluster network environments into a single high-speed 10Gb Ethernet fabric that supports protocols such as Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and iSCSI.

Dell continued its quest of the data center by filling the void that its competitors such as IBM and HP currently which is their own I/O virtualization product. Dell has announced that has selected Xsigo Systems as provider of I/O virtualization solutions -- a critical technology necessary for optimizing data centers. In addition to reselling Xsigo's virtual I/O solutions, the companies will work together on technology roadmaps and the development of reseller resources, allowing Dell to further expand its data center offerings.
What is interesting with this agreement is that Dell certainly could have made a play in acquiring Xsigo, but did not. This may be a case of Xsigo asking price being too large or Dell wanting to test the waters before making a bid.

The agreement was non-exclusive which leaves Xsigo open to working with Dell's competitors or worse available for acquisition which would leave Dell without a virtualization component in the data center market that demands it.