Barton's Blog

The Friday before last my boss Andy and I had a call with James Niccolai of IDG.  We chatted about what we’ve been up to at Dell as well as teed up what we have in store for the near distant future.

Here is the result:

• PCworld, “Dell Plans New Line of ‘cloud’ Servers this Year“
• The Register, “Dell floats new line of lighter, pared-down servers — Little fluffy CloudEdge“
• The Inquirer, “Dell to make hardware for cloud — Thar’s god in them thar clouds“

To get the full scoop you should read the articles but here are some summary bits from the PCworld article:

The DCS [Data Center Solutions] unit was formed about three years ago to help Dell get more business from large Internet firms. Its engineers often spend several weeks on-site with those companies to design low-cost, low-power systems that meet the special requirements of their search, social networking and other Web applications.

That hands-on role means the DCS group designs servers only for large companies, such as Ask.com and Microsoft’s Azure division, which order tens of thousands of servers per year. But that’s about to change, Dell executives said in an interview.

Later this year Dell will turn some of those custom servers into standardized products and sell them to companies that order lower volumes of systems, including enterprises building “private cloud” environments in their data centers, and a second tier of smaller Internet companies.

“What we’ve found is, there are a whole bunch of other customers who want access to those designs but who are not buying in those types of quantities,” said Andy Rhodes, a director with Dell’s DCS group. “So the big thing we’re solving now, and we’ll talk more publically about over the next couple of months, is how to provide more of that capability to many, many more customers.”

Stay tuned for more

Pau for now…