El Reg love: “Dell’s DCS is a big shiny server star”


Timothy Prickett Morgan of everyone’s favorite vulture-branded media site The Register attended a round table discussion we held a few weeks ago in New York.  His piece from that event, which was focused around the cloud, was posted yesterday.

You should check out the whole article but here are some snippets to whet your appetite:

What DCS is all about

For the past several years – and some of them not particularly good ones – Dell’s Data Center Services (DCS) bespoke iron-making forge down in Round Rock, Texas, has been a particularly bright spot in the company’s enterprise business.

The unit has several hundred employees, who craft and build custom server kit for these picky Webby shops, where power and cooling issues actually matter more than raw performance. The high availability features necessary to keep applications running are in the software, so you can rip enterprise-class server features out of the boxes – they are like legs on a snake.

How we’re working with web-based gaming company OnLive

“These guys took a bet on Facebook early, and they benefited from that,” says Perlman [OnLive Founder and CEO]. “And now they are making a bet on us.”

OnLive allows gamers to play popular video games on their PCs remotely through a Web browser and soon on their TVs with a special (and cheap) HDMI and network adapter. The games are actually running back in OnLive’s data centers, and the secret sauce that Perlman has been working on to make console games work over the Internet and inside of a Web browser is what he called “error concealment”.

DCS had to create a custom server to integrate their video compression board into the machine, as well as pack in some high-end graphics cards to drive the games. Power and cooling are big issues. And no, you can’t see the servers. It’s a secret.

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 19th, 2010 at 10:55 am 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.

3 Responses to El Reg love: “Dell’s DCS is a big shiny server star”

  1. Cloud gamers OnLive on working with Dell DCS « Barton's Blog says:
    October 24, 2010 at 9:10 pm

    […] my last entry I talked about how Ron Perlman, CEO and founder of OnLive joined the recent press round table we […]

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  2. The Importance of Supply Chain when Serving the Internet’s Cloudy Superstars « Barton's Blog says:
    November 8, 2010 at 8:51 am

    […] Dell, the company that built its success around supply chain management excellence, started the Data Center Solutions group to serve the biggest of the big in scale out cloud deployments, supply chain and procurement […]

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  3. Tier5 first to fire up Dell’s 3rd-gen Modular Data Center « Barton's Blog says:
    November 14, 2010 at 11:08 pm

    […] get Tier5 exactly what they wanted Dell’s DCS team worked collaboratively with the Tier5 engineers over a period of nine to 10 months to nail down the […]

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