Dell today introduced new infrastructure services to help organisations of all sizes improve their storage management and data protection, enable effective disaster recovery procedures and implementation of backup recovery processes.
The company already has a portfolio of consulting services, but this launch marks an aggressive push into the managed services arena, which Stephen Davies, Dell's storage alliances manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, was an area that was underserved for smaller firms and those not attracted to the prospect of long, expensive consulting projects.
"We're more likely to end up offering managed services off the back of the assessments we're offering, where people know of Dell from a hardware point of view," he said. "This will give us a software point of view from the perspective of best practice."
He also said that, with exponential data growth and increased complexity, the new offerings would be particularly attractive to smaller or midsized enterprises (SMEs).
The new offerings include implementation of a tiered-storage infrastructure where less critical data can be moved to the appropriate tier driving down costs for the business and assessments to rapidly identify improvements within backup and recovery infrastructure that will help to stabilise and optimise operations. This includes the planning, design and implementation of data disaster recovery plans.
Davies added that Dell is using in-house IT infrastructure expertise to deliver these new services, with the acquisition of the Network Storage Company last year. In addition, Dell will partner with GlassHouse Technologies in the UK initially to cater to larger enterprise needs.
"There's an appetite for storage services, but companies are weary of long engagements that last for six months and the end result is a PowerPoint with a bunch of meaningless platitudes," said Stephanie Balaouras, Forrester senior analyst. "What I like about [Dell's services] is that there is an emphasis on consulting engagements that are short in duration and the recommendations are useful and actionable."
