Dell announces Quest Software acquisition… finally
Dell has entered into a definitive agreement to buy desktop virtualisation-related vendor Quest Software for $2.36bn (pound 1.51bn).
Under terms of the agreement, Dell Inc. will pay $28.00 (pound 18.00) per share in cash for each share of Quest Software Inc. for an aggregate purchase price of about $2.4 billion.
How Dell's Quest buy can lower VDI cost
With Quest acquisition, Dell can offer almost all aspects of VDI and bring down the cost of VDI.
Dell’s announcement on Monday ends the speculation about who the “superior bidder” was in the battle for the company with investment firm Insight Venture Partners.
Dell had previously made an offer to buy Quest in May. At that time, analysts and experts said that the deal could help Dell expand its desktop virtualisation portfolio even further and gain access to Quest’s 100,000 worldwide customers.
Quest will help Dell deliver more competitive server, storage, networking and end user computing services, said John Swainson, president, Dell Software Group, the division Dell formed recently.
Dell had acquired another desktop virtualisation vendor, Wyse Technologies, Inc. in April this year.
The transaction is expected to close in Dell’s third fiscal quarter, subject to approval by Quest’s shareholders and customary conditions.
VMware and Nimble Storage collaborate for mobile VDI
IT pros’ plans to use VDI architecture to support their BYOD initiatives will not be limited by traditional storage arrays anymore.
VMware Inc. has collaborated with Nimble Storage Inc., the provider of hardware and software tools for data storage, to support Nimble’s flash-enabled storage architecture in VMware View Mobile Secure Desktop product.
The flash-enabled storage arrays within the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) architecture will help IT bring better user provisioning, scalability and performance to their Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies, according to the companies.
VDI architecture supports BYOD by using a storage architecture that uses flash to provide low-latency access to data even when multiple users log into their VDI workspaces simultaneously. Traditional storage is not capable of providing such low-latency, the vendors said.
Nimble’s Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL) architecture uses inline compression to compress VDI data 40-50% without increasing latency.
Storage performance is a single biggest obstacle to successful VDI implementations, according to VMware. Providing users access to virtual desktops and the data and applications stored in them as well as supporting access from mobile devices adds pressure on the storage architecture.
Using flash-enabled arrays in a VMware View environment improves how the mobile workforce accesses applications and data, said Paul Nicholson, vice president of information systems for EU Services, a direct mail marketing company.
Red Hat and SAP in open source virtualisation deal
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.0 is now certified to run SAP business applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The collaboration is to provide customers with easier deployments of SAP applications in virtualised infrastructure, on physical Red Hat Inc. servers, or in the cloud.
Customers will have a virtualisation platform that can scale to support growing numbers of workloads and users as well as compatibility between RHEV and the SAP ecosystem, all based on open source virtualisation technology, according to Red Hat.
