Dell Enters Content Delivery Fray with Dell Deliver

How fast can YOU deliver? VARs looking to speed their content delivery portfolio should check out Dell Deliver, Dell‘s (NASDAQ: DELL) first-ever content delivery platform (CDP) that allows network providers to sell content delivery network (CDN) services as well as manage the on-demand delivery of video to any screen.

Dell Deliver, which can be deployed through a number of different models, is built on the company’s PowerEdge 12th generation servers with software from EdgeCast Networks and Elemental Technologies. The solution includes video processing software from Elemental Technologies that add additional cost and performance benefits to the customer.

Elemental’s software leverages massively parallel NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs) and Intel processors to offer a dense and cost-effective transcoding solution. With the central management portal, customers can deploy, procure and monitor their CDN in one portal, allowing staff to manage resources without manual intervention, and the solution’s self-provisioning tool not only lets administrators easily separate usage statistics, reporting and internal billing, but also allows them to go out and sell these features to their customers.

Deliver’s multitier caching hierarchy provides automated analytics capabilities that can determine what content is more popular and store that content in locations where it is being consumed, minimizing traffic between delivery nodes, and content is protected by a range of advanced security features and supports digital rights management (DRM) solutions.

Dell Deliver is a formidable opponent to Medianet, Cisco Systems’ enterprise CDP it debuted in 2009. Other vendors have also joined the CDP fray, including IBM with its Content Manager platform and Alcatel-Lucent with its Velocix offering.

With IT infrastructure management and maintenance growing more complicated for network operators as demand grows for IP-based, bandwidth-hogging content, VARs need to tell their customers they can deliver—and Dell wants to help them do that. Message received.