Business Services Industry

Dell Launches Assessment and Consulting Services to Help Customers Rapidly Analyze and Deploy Storage Environments

Business Wire, Feb 13, 2008

* New offerings can speed evaluation to days, not weeks

* Enterprise-level assessments now practical for mid-market

ROUND ROCK, Texas -- Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) today introduced the Dell Storage Simplification Assessments portfolio, a globally-consistent set of offerings designed to simplify the evaluation and selection of storage, backup, recovery and archiving environments. The new offerings will help customers improve the management and scalability of their storage and backup infrastructure while helping them cope with the dramatic increase in the volume of data in traditional and virtualized settings.

A departure from the industry's traditional storage and backup consulting approach, Dell Assessment services can deliver information to the customer in days, instead of weeks, by leveraging non-disruptive tools and processes. The offers provide a technical and operational inventory of customers' environments and help them more rapidly decide which solution will best meet their needs.

"The combination of Dell's recent storage acquisitions and this new global services delivery makes it very clear that Dell is focused on helping customers address storage growth along the path to simplifying IT," said Doug Chandler, research director, Infrastructure Services, IDC. "The steps Dell is taking to provide an end-to-end storage portfolio that simplifies the storage market for customers are compelling."

The Storage Simplification Assessments portfolio includes the following options:

* The Storage for Server Virtualization Assessment helps customers quickly evaluate their existing storage infrastructure to help ensure data is properly managed in virtualized environments.

* The Backup, Restore and Archive Assessment analyzes an organization's entire backup and restoration environment and helps to proactively address recovery time objectives.

* The Data Management and Storage Technology Assessment provides customers with a detailed analysis of their existing storage infrastructure in order to determine the storage technologies needed to meet their business needs.

"After experiencing strong business growth, we had serious issues managing our 15TB storage and backup environment," said Richard Sacre, IT director, John Brown Publishing. "By leveraging Dell's Storage Simplification Assessment portfolio, we were able to more fully understand existing issues and identify how data was being utilized within our organization. As a result, we have completely redesigned our storage and backup infrastructure to allow for high speed file serving, immediate access to archived data and improved scalability that will allow us to focus on growing our business."

"For many customers, storage infrastructure has become unnecessarily difficult to manage," said Paul Kaeley, Storage Consulting Practice Leader, Dell. "Dell's new Storage Simplification assessments identify the core issues driving complexity and provide a path to simplifying customers' storage and backup environments."

Dell's Storage Simplification Assessments are available immediately through Dell and will be offered to Dell Registered Partners looking to enhance storage consulting, deployment and integration capabilities. To learn more about the portfolio, please visit www.dell.com/.> About Dell

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and services they trust and value. Uniquely enabled by its direct business model, Dell is a leading global systems and services company and No. 34 on the Fortune 500. For more information, visit www.dell.com, or to communicate directly with Dell via a variety of online channels, go to www.dell.com/conversations. To get Dell news direct, visit www.dell.com/RSS.>