Today Dell is announcing our new PowerEdge C8000 shared infrastructure chassis which allows you to mix and match compute, GPU/coprocessor and storage sleds all within the same enclosure. What this allows Web companies to do is to have one common building block that can be used to provide support across the front-, mid- and back…
A little over a week ago, Dell’s Data Center Solutions (DCS) group marked its fifth birthday. As Timothy Prickett Morgan explains in his article subtitled, “Five years old, and growing like a weed”: DCS was founded originally to chase the world’s top 20 hyperscale data center operators, and creates stripped-down, super-dense, and energy-efficient machines that…
Late last week we announced that Dell’s Data Center Solutions group had outfitted Bing Maps’ uber-efficient, uber-compact data center (or as Microsoft calls it “microsite”), located in Longmont, Colorado. The facility is a dedicated imagery processing site to support Streetside, Bird’s Eye, aerial and satellite image types provided by Bing Maps. The site’s key components…
Last Thursday a group of us from Dell attended and participated in the unveiling of Facebook’s Open Compute project. Much the way open source software shares the code behind the software, the Open Compute project has been created to provide the specifications behind the servers and the data center. By releasing these specs, Facebook is…
This morning, at Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, the company unveiled the Open Compute project. Also on hand to support the announcement were partners such as Dell and Intel, who served on a panel alongside representatives from Rackspace, the Department of Energy, Zynga and Facebook. Forrest Norrod, GM of Dell’s server platform division represented Dell…
Today at its headquarters in Palo Alto, Facebook and a collection of partners such as Dell, Intel and AMD — as well as kindred spirits like RackSpace’s founder (the company behind OpenStack) and the CIO of the Department of Energy — are on hand to reveal the details behind Facebook’s first custom-built data center and…
Dell’s Data Center Solutions group (DCS) is no longer a toddler. Over the weekend we turned four! Four years ago on March 27, 2007 Dell announced the formation of the Data Center Solutions group, a special crack team designed to service the needs of hyperscale customers. On that day eWeek announced the event in their…
Over the past three years Dell’s Data Center Solutions group has been designing custom microservers for a select group of web hosters. The first generation allowed one of France’s largest hosters, Online.net to enter a new market and gain double digit market share. The second generation brought additional capabilities to the original design along with…
Online.net, owned by the Iliad group, is the second largest hoster in the French market. The company had traditionally been focused on the higher end of the dedicated hosting market with services starting at 29.99 euro/month and predominantly based on Dell’s rack mounted servers. About three years ago they began exploring the possibility of providing…
A couple of weeks ago, we announced the PowerEdge C6145 system made up of two servers crammed into a 2U enclosure with a total of 96 cores. Today that system officially became available for purchase. Rave reviews This system got a great review in CRN yesterday entitled “Performance Of Dell’s PowerEdge C6145 Rack Server Off…
Monday I wrote about the announcement of our mega-beefy, 96-core PowerEdge C6145 server, specifically geared to customers solving big problems involving huge and complex data sets in mapping, visualization, simulations and rendering. At the other end of the spectrum however are customers, such as those offering low-end dedicated hosting solutions, who are looking for systems…
Today Dell Data Center Solutions (DCS) is announcing the PowerEdge C6145, number four in our line of offerings targeted specifically at High Performance Computing. This AMD-based system, which contains two four-socket servers for a total of 96 cores, ranked as the highest performing x86 2U shared infrastructure server on the market based on SPECfp_rate2006 results….
In case you’re not familiar with it, Dell’s Data Center Solutions (DCS) group has been around for nearly four years, acting as a “custom tailor” to some of the largest internet superstars and scale-out leaders, organizations like Facebook, Microsoft Azure and Lawrence Livermore national labs. A year ago DCS added to this custom capability by…
Last November, Dell announced the Dell Cloud Solution for Web Applications. This turnkey offering is composed of Dell systems and Joyent Software along with a reference architecture all supported by Dell services. This solution enables a private Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment to support the development and testing of languages such as PHP, Perl,…
Dell’s Data Center Solutions (DCS) group has some pretty colorful folks. One of the more interesting members is Jimmy Pike, the man IDG New’s James Niccolai refered to as the “Willy Wonka of servers.” Jimmy, the self-proclaimed “chief geek” of the DCS team is the consummate tinkerer whether that involves constructing a data center in…
Every year at the end of January Dell holds a giant kick-off meeting for our enterprise and public sales forces. The event, which has been held in Las Vegas the last two years, is a four-day happening consisting of keynotes, sessions and a full-scale expo where the sales team can touch and learn first-hand about…
Dell’s Data Center Solutions (DCS) group focuses on customers operating huge scaled out environments. Given the number of systems deployed in these environments we are always looking for ways to take energy out of our systems. A half a watt here, a half a watt there means big energy savings when multiplied across a hyper…
Back in March we announced Dell’s cloud solutions. Today at a press conference in San Francisco we announced their general availability along with some examples of customers who are employing them. (Woohoo!) What’s the big idea The idea behind these offerings has been to leverage the experience we in the DCS group have gained over…
Last week, Tier5 who has taken over an old Mitsubishi facility in Adelaide was the first company globally to deploy Dell’s third generation Modular Data Center. Tier5 is an eight-person start up that is turning the former auto plant into a state-of-the-art data center park to be leased by wholesale tenants including managed service providers,…
Ironically when 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,” supply chain and procurement were just bit players. I recently sat down with Chris Thompson who heads up the DCS supply chain and procurement organization and learned how…