Barton's Blog

Over the last few years, we have been working with some of the world’s biggest hyperscale data center operators, folks who are deploying thousands, to tens of thousands of servers at a time. Within this select group, the theme that keeps coming up over and over is uber-efficiency.

The customers that we’ve been working with in areas like Web 2.0 and hosting  require solutions that are not only extremely dense, but also dramatically drive down costs.  When operating at the scale that these organizations do, ultra-efficiency is not a nice to have; it’s one of the most important tools the organization has to drive profitability.

It is with these customers and with their need for ultra-efficiency in mind that we designed the newest edition to our custom light-weight server line-up: Viking, designed to “pillage” inefficiency  🙂

Some of the points Ed touches on:

• Viking can hold eight or 12 server nodes in a 3U chassis
• Each node is a single socket server with up to 4 hard drives & 16GB of RAM along with two gigabit ethernet ports
• It supports Intel’s Lynnfield or Clarkdale processors which means its 2-4 core’s per processor
• The chassis also features an integrated switch and includes shared power and cooling infrastructure
• The system is cold-aisle serviceable which means everything you need to get to is right in the front.

Related Reading:

• Wall Street Journal: Dell Tries to Cut Power Bills with Viking
• The Register: Dell’s Viking servers raid hyperscale data centers
• Back to the Future with Light Weight Servers

Pau for now…

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 12th, 2010 at 8:07 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.