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

October 19, 2010

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…

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Posted by Barton George

El Reg gives DCS props for HPC innovation

October 5, 2010

The week before last a crew from Dell was out at NVIDIA’s GPU tech conference, showing our latest and greatest offerings in the HPC space.  It looks like our PowerEdge C410x expansion chassis system caught the eye of the Register HPC blog writer Dan Olds.

Below are some excerpts from Dan’s article, “Dell gets busy with GPUs” followed by the video he shot.   I love the video theme music and the fact that its a “BPV (Bad Production Values) presentation.”  [BTW We’ll have to give Dan the full Data Center Solutions(DCS) rundown at some point so that he can see that when it comes to design and innovation, the C410x is not an outlier 🙂 ]

From Dan’s Article:

Okay, let’s put it on the table: when the conversation turns to cutting-edge x86 server design and innovation, the name “Dell” doesn’t come up all that often. Their reputation was made on delivering decent products quickly at a low cost. I see that opinion in all of our x86 customer-based research – it’s even something that Dell employees will cop to.

That said, two of the most innovative and cutting-edge designs on the GPU Tech Conference show floor were sitting in the Dell booth, and that’s the topic of this video blog….

It’s the second product that really captured my interest. Their PowerEdge C410x is a 3U PCIe expansion chassis that can hold up to 16 PCIe devices and connect up to eight servers with Gen2 x16 PCIe cables. Customers can use it to host NVIDIA Fermi GPU cards, SSDs, Infiniband, or any other PCIe device their heart desires. What made my motor run was the possibility of cramming it full of Fermi cards and then using it as an enterprise shared device – NAC: Network Attached Compute.

…Dell deserves kudos for putting out this box. It’s a step ahead of what HP and IBM are currently offering, and it moves the ball forward toward an NAC future.

Extra credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Thanks to Tim Bray I’m an Honourary Cheeky Brit

June 25, 2009

Reg_Podcast_Logo I was quite chuffed to find that my first freelance piece for The Register was featured on the front page.  The piece is a 17 minute podcast and accompanying intro article that covers the conversation I had with XML co-developer and really smart guy, Tim Bray.

Tim was a great interview.  Not only is he very knowledgeable but he answers questions very lucidly.   Take a listen and see for yourself.

>> Listen (17:24)  mp3 version | ogg version

Why's Tim so Jazzed about 20 year-old Swedish Telco language (other than the cool graphics)?

Why's Tim so jazzed about a 20 year-old Swedish Telco language (other than the cool graphics)?

Some of the topics Tim tackles:

  • The state of the web today.
  • The evolution of Twitter: Ruby on Rails + Scala + ?
  • Dynamic languages that rock Tim’s world:  PHP? Python? Ruby on Rails?  Closure?
  • And speaking of dark horses, what about Erlang?  dealing with wider CPUs and concurrency.
  • Is Google’s Wave the next Twitter or the next Lotus Notes?
  • What’s happening in browser land?  And what about HTML5 (video and canvas)?
  • Opera’s recent announcement and the value of web hooks.
  • Tim’s been “Kindled.”  What other web business models are working out there?
  • What most rock’s Tim’s world: 1) Databases duking it out – what’s the right way to persist data at scale and 2) Mobile platforms: Android, iPhone, Palm Pre — all very different approaches.

Shout outs: To Terri Molini for setting this up and Paul Bonser of X-team for introducing me, over beers, to Erlang.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George