Dell is pushing the energy message in its latest product announcements saying its PowerEdge R710 server provides the industry's best performance per watt.
The firm targeted HP saying its M-series blade architecture has "27 percent lower acquisition cost and delivers 17 percent lower TCO over 5 years per rack compared to HP c-Class."
The company said select configurations Dell Precision T7500, T5500 and T3500 tower workstations have achieved Energy Star 5.0 certification.
On the services front Dell set up Data Center Consulting which promises to cut data center hardware costs through server virtualization and storage/backup optimization.
"Data center operations require a holistic view to reduce overall operational costs, whether that is people, time or money over a technology lifecycle," said Michelle Bailey, VP of Enterprise Platforms and Data Center Trends at IDC. "Dell is focused on how it integrates and aligns the enterprise technologies across its product portfolio to help companies simplify and manage their organizations' IT infrastructure."
Management functions in the server line include a new Lifecycle Controller that delivers integrated manageability through a single access point and factory installed ImageDirect Server simplifies transitions and image management for servers.
Dell said it is challenging HP's proprietary management framework with the introduction of Dell Management Console (DMC), a software solution powered by Altiris from Symantec, "designed to unite systems management across IT environments into a single console."
On the storage front Dell announced EqualLogic PS6000 storage arrays Dell is unveiling SAN Headquarters, a centralized dashboard that monitors performance and events for dozens of PS Series groups, potentially more than 10 PB of SAN storage. SAN Headquarters is available to any EqualLogic customer with a support agreement at no additional cost.
The company lined up customers and partners to endorse its move.
Claus Moldt, vice president of technical operations, salesforce.com, said: "Dell is paving the way in architecting systems for our future data center needs. As a long time Dell PowerEdge customer, salesforce.com uses Dell's infrastructure to power over a hundred million transactions a day for our 1.5 million subscribers."
Stephen C. Hassell, vice president and chief information officer, Emerson: "One of Emerson's key business strategies is to deliver data center energy-efficiency solutions to our customers, and we also are extremely focused on ensuring that our own data centers are as operationally and energy efficient as possible. So when we began a consolidation of Emerson's data centers and planning for a new state-of-the-art center, we conducted an exhaustive search for next-generation blade servers that delivered both high performance, especially in a virtualized environment, and energy-efficiency gains. That is why we selected Dell's eleventh-generation PowerEdge blade servers."
Meanwhile CEO Micheal Dell was reported as saying that he is looking into acquisitions to bolster the company's presence in the data center market.
HP will launch its latest product range next week.