Dell will help corporations go green

Dell plans to release a reference architecture in the future that will pave the way for enterprises to reduce power consumption and go green in the future, Dell CEO Michael Dell said in a keynote at the Oracle 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 percent of U.S. energy in 2007 was consumed by datacenters and by 2011, 70 percent of U.S. corporations will witness disruptions due to power constraints, Dell said, citing Gartner statistics.

Dell did not detail the reference architecture, but said it will help corporations determine how green they are today, and help create plans to get 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, going green starts within his organization, Dell said.

"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-inch convertible laptop and has a 25 percent brighter screen than competitors. It will support new "multitouch" technology, said Kevin Kettler, Dell's chief technology officer, during an on-stage demonstration.

In addition to using single-touch capabilities with a finger or stylist, the laptop will bring multitouch capabilities to life with users being able to 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 be announcing 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. 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 like memory increases or software updates, Kettler said.