Dell Tries to Explain Virtualization to End Customers

Image by Bill Ward’s Brickpile via Flickr

Try to explain virtualization to the layperson, the office manager of a nearby physician practice or the CEO of a regional retail chain, and you may get that blank stare, deer-in-headlights look.

You put all the servers onto one server? What? What good is that? And why didn’t we do it all along?

Plenty of people have tried to explain it. Dell even has a new set of videos out, promoted on its channel PartnerDirect blog in an effort to help partners explain the technology to their small business and enterprise end customers.

The videos cover the following topics for small and medium-size business customers:

• Virtualization and the SMB: Not Just for the Big Guys
• Virtualization and the SMB: Keeping Your Business Up and Running
• Virtualization and the SMB: Boosting Performance and Productivity
• Virtualization and the SMB: Protect and Secure Your Business

And for large business customers:

• Virtualization Reduces Costs
• Virtualization Improves Performance
• Virtualization Reduces the Impact of Data Disasters
• Virtualization Makes Businesses More Efficient

And while the effort is laudable and the explanation of the benefits is OK, it’s just one guy talking. I’m not sure that it’s a home run as far as explaining how it all works.

Virtualization maven, Channel Insider contributor and Evolve Technologies CEO Dave Sobel provides great insight into why small business should get on board with virtualization in an article he penned for Channel Insider here.

And here’s another set of explanations I found, in case you want to explain virtualization to your mother or other non-technical people: How to Explain Virtualization to Your Friends.

Do you have a better analogy? How do you talk about virtualization to your customers? Do they get it?