Michael Dell took the stage today at a Dell event with a focus on the demands that come with companies now reaching a maturing stage with its extensive virtualized infrastructure and the continued drive to use Web and cloud services.

At the center of the news is Dell’s second generation of embedded management technology with a portfolio of 12th generation blade, rack and tower PowerEdge servers for mission critical business applications. Of  particular note is flash integration with front accessible” hot swappable PCIe solid state disks” connected directly to the server.

But the real story behind this news is about the evolving app culture. Dell sees two paths. Customers need increased virtualization density to support legacy apps.  And there is a need for new ways to support emerging workloads such as Hadoop.

That sets the stage for Dell’s news today and the increasing rhetoric in the battle with HP. Earlier this month, HP announced its next generation of server technology. Today, Dell made its own news with a broader focus on enterprise solutions rotating around its PowerEdge servers.

Michael Dell trivialized HP’s news. But that saya a lot in itself and shines a different light on Dell’s broader efforts leverage the PowerEdge servers around its storage and networking portfolio.

This news mirrors what we hear a lot about in the market. Flash is gaining fast adoption; the servers need greater density to support additional virtual machines and the network is facing more demands, fueling a market for 40 gigabyte fabrics.

Services Angle

Dell executives said that CIO are having to rethink their entire infrastruture around applications, workloads and the data in that pool. There will be an increasing number of mixed data environments.

“You will have e on-premise infrastructure. and you will have cloud servces and you will have managed services,” said Praveen Asthana, vice president, Enterprise Solutions, Strategy and Technology. “I don’t want a forklift ugrade. I want to evolvoe from where I am.”

Disclosure: Dell paid for my plane ticket and hotel to attend its event.