Addressing eBay’s Project Mercury needs with Dell’s Modular Data Center

April 17, 2012

Back on December12, eBay held their grand opening for their Project Mercury data center in Scottsdale, Arizona.  In attendance were all the partners that contributed along with members of the Data Center Pulse group.  Although the event itself wasn’t secret, the details were held in check until a couple of weeks ago when Derrick Harris posted his article in GigaOm

Some of the details published were the actual PUE numbers around Dell’s Modular Data Center:

Project Mercury gets free cooling year round, even in the heat of summer. On Aug. 23, 2011 — a 119-degree day — one of eBay’s Dell units had a partial-PUE score 0f 1.044 while drawing 520 kilowatts of power. On January 17, 2012, while drawing 1 megawatt, the same unit had consistent partial PUE of 1.018 while the rest of the data center was doing between 1.26 and 1.35.

And the winner is

Today the Uptime Institute announced that this Modular Data Center Product Deployment by eBay and Dell were named recipients of the 2012 Green Enterprise IT Award.

Here is a video I did at the opening back in December with Dell’s GM for our Data Center Solutions group, Roy Guillen.  Roy talks about what eBay was looking for and how we answered the challenge.

Some of the ground Roy covers:

  • The challenge that eBay issued
  • How Dell got involved
  • The evolution of Dell’s Modular Data Center and what eBay proved about the ability to group a whole bunch of workloads that don’t require tier 4 resiliency

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Meet Roy Guillen — GM of Dell’s DCS group

February 11, 2011

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 bringing out a line of specialized servers paired with software solutions targeted at the tier of customers right below these “biggest of the big.”

A changing of the guard
Last March, Roy Guillen took over the helm as the General Manager of the DCS group when the then current GM, Forrest Norrod was promoted to run all of servers at Dell.  Near the end of the year I sat down with Roy to get his thoughts on what made DCS, DCS and learn what success looked like for him.

Some of the ground Roy covers:

  • His Background
  • [0:49] What makes DCS unique within Dell and the industry
  • [2:01] The customer story that best sums up DCS
  • [3:25] The one thing that isn’t well known about DCS
  • [4:18] What does success look like for you?

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George