Dell Sells IT Services Unit For $3 Billion (informationweek.com) 28
An anonymous reader writes: On Monday, March 28, Dell has publicly announced it is selling its IT services unit to NTT Data of Japan for more than $3 billion. The sale of Dell's IT services marks the first and largest transaction the company has taken on since it disclosed in December that it was considering divestitures to help offset its buyout of storage giant EMC, said Dell spokesperson David Frink. However, Frink cautioned that it's not fair to speculate that there will be more divestitures to come or that this will be the last, as the company moves forward with its EMC buyout deal that is valued at roughly $60 billion. The deal between Dell and NTT Data will help ease some of the financial burden of the deal between Dell and EMC. According to Frink, that mega-deal with EMC is expected to close in the August to October timeframe.
Dell's history?? (Score:2)
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Anyone have any insight or thoughts?
Here is some free advice: Don't risk your core business on closed source software.
If your client is a "small non-profit", then why isn't something like VirtualBox good enough?
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Probably not the best altenative, but not idiotic without knowing the size of deployment. But CentOS/RH (aka linux kvm), ProxMox (same deal) or shrug, free Hyper-V are sensible alternatives.
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Re: Dell's history?? (Score:2)
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In the US the cut point is at 50 employees, for regulatory and tax purposes. And I agree, more than 50 and you can start losing the personal relationships which are characteristic of small businesses.
There is a bias in the media and in culture to not take businesses with less than hundreds of employees seriously "Bigger is better" is the bias but it small business which drive innovation (e.g. Apple in the early days) and employment.
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For any and all small to medium size systems I always prefer to go with KVM. With Red Hat's Virt-Manager it's an excellent low-cost and high-performance solution. It's all open source too, which I like very much, but external support might be more expensive to acquire. If you have great talent in-house, then there's usually no need for fallback support.
Re: Dell's history?? (Score:1)
Re: Dell's history?? (Score:1)
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If you mean running Windows as a guest, then yes, it works just fine! I haven't used much Windows on KVM lately, but anything non-3D is fluent and should work out of the box without any problems. Using the virtio disk drivers in nocache mode gives also great disk performance, even on Windows (even better on 'writeback' mode, but it's inherently unsafe to use for critical systems).
If you ever want to try KVM the super easy way, just install the virt-manager package on any Linux distro and it's pretty straigh
Re: Dell's history?? (Score:1)
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VMware has already been down the path of starting to neglect/retire lower cost options, and raise prices on their core products. They already were eager to have high-margin, but now the pressure is *really* on to gouge their 'captive' customer base for more money.
For a 'smallish nonprofit', you'd nearly certainly be better off with either CentOS/RH or Hyper-V, depending on your inclinations. Actually this is the particular problem Dell faces. They seem very enthusiastic about VMware, but I see vmware's p
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VMWare is a different company than EMC. EMC owns a large percentage of it (controlling interest). Dell's offer (at least originally) would continue the separation of the companies. Obviously, with controlling interest, it would be easy enough to make the vote of the VMWare board go in whatever direction they wanted. But short-term, you shouldn't have to worry.......it will be at least a year after the EMC deal closes before they make many drastic changes.
Perhaps not the wisest move... (Score:5, Interesting)
Though Dell is not the biggest of players in that space, that seems like the most 'clingy' sort of customers. If you truly have outsourced your IT, it's very challenging to change your vendor, since you by definition opted not to have the in-house skills needed to be able to do that.
Compare that to any hardware/software solution, where the client retains enough in-house to be able to say 'You know what, we can switch vendors and here's what the cost picture looks like'. This includes EMC gear.
Also interesting that Dell acquired this division in 2009 for 3.9B. They lost 900 million dollars on the effort.
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Look at how Nokia turned out for Microsoft or Motorola did for Google.
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