OpenWorld: Dell will help corporations go green

IDG News Service - SAN FRANCISCO -- Dell Inc. plans to release a reference architecture that will help enterprises reduce power consumption and go green in the future, CEO Michael Dell said in a keynote at Oracle Corp.'s OpenWorld 2007 conference on Wednesday.

Reducing power consumption and going green is just one part of reducing IT complexity in the future, he said.

Online transactions are putting an infinite demand on servers, which puts an infinite demand on energy, Dell said. About 1.5% of U.S. energy in 2007 was consumed by data centers, and by 2011, 70% of U.S. corporations will witness disruptions because of power constraints, Dell said, citing Gartner Inc. statistics.

Dell did not detail the upcoming reference architecture but said it will help corporations determine how green they are today and help them create plans to become more green in the future. "We call it your Greenprint. Stay tuned to hear more about that," he said.

While the Greenprint reference architecture will help other companies, Dell said going green starts within his organization.

"Dell will be carbon-neutral by the end of 2008," Dell said.

In addition to the green initiative, Dell also announced the new Latitude XT tablet PC, which he said is the industry's thinnest 12.1-in. convertible laptop and has a 25% brighter screen than those on competitors' laptops. It will support new "multitouch" technology, said Kevin Kettler, Dell's chief technology officer, during an onstage demonstration.

In addition to supporting single-touch features that work with a user's finger or a stylist, the laptop will let customers use multiple fingers to draw lines or manage images simultaneously, Kettler said.

"It's going to be a great avenue for creative applications to be developed around it," Kettler said. The system will ship in the next few months, Dell said.

The company will also announce a new all-in-one PC next week, Dell said, teasing the audience with a prototype on the stage.

As part of the effort to simplify IT, Dell also outlined efforts by the company to ease IT support for enterprises and users. Also at the show, Dell announced that it would deliver Solaris to users on its PowerEdge servers and support the Oracle VM hypervisor for systems using Oracle software. The virtual machine will transition workload seamlessly between machines, reducing system downtime while administrators perform system maintenance, such as memory increases or software updates, Kettler said.