Dell Offers Large-Scale Data Center Design Service

Published: March 27, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Beleaguered server maker Dell has sold plenty of servers into very large scale data centers, and as the 25th largest company in the United States according to the Fortune 500 rankings, it has some experience in running a large, Web-driven business. And so, Dell today announced the Computing Cloud Solution, which could go down in history as one of the vaguest product names in IT history.

The idea behind the Computing Cloud Solution is simple. Dell wants to help companies deploying large-scale data centers wrestle with the issues of server and storage architecture, networking, power and cooling, and other difficulties in the data center today. Dell is known for its build-to-order, direct sales model for PCs and servers, and the Computing Cloud Solution takes this approach up one more level, providing data center design services to customers who pick a mix Dell and its partners' hardware to retrofit their existing data centers or build entirely new ones.

Like everyone else looking for a marketing hook, Dell has used the nebulous "Web 2.0" moniker to try to describe a unique set of applications that it is chasing with the new service, and is trying to make the case that customers deploying Web applications are somehow different from other companies. This is, of course, utter nonsense. What can be honestly said is that the largest data centers in the world are being driven by the dominant Internet application providers, and the scalability of their networks means that they can probably use some engineering expertise and, perhaps equally important, some input into how server and storage makers like Dell create and package their products.

The Computing Cloud Solution includes data center capacity planning services, prototype and custom-built hardware, component-level optimization by Dell's engineers, and custom services for the deployment of "hyperscale" data centers and break/fix service plans that are tuned to this scale.

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