In growing technology markets, the rate of innovation increases as the technologies become more accessible. That’s what is most significant about the announcement from Dell today that it is now offering servers, loaded and ready to go.
The servers are designed with the power and optimized for customers that wish to create their own cloud-based infrastructures, be they public or private services.
For instance, this might include customers that provide high performance computing (HPC), SaaS or wish to build their own public or private cloud.
Dell’s Mark Cathcart puts it this way:
“Perhaps significantly, one of the more important parts of this set of announcements are the turnkey cloud solutions comprised of pre-tested, pre-assembled and fully-supported hardware, software and services enabling customers easily and quickly to deploy and manage cloud infrastructures with confidence, taking much of the guesswork out of building and running efficient private and public clouds. This is a key theme of our “Efficient Enterprise” Strategy and best value solutions.”
Of interest is Microsoft’s involvement with Dell. The two will work together on the Windows Azure platform. Microsoft will continue to invest in Dell hardware for Windows Azure infrastructure.
The new push is focused on mid to medium-sized businesses. These are companies that face increasing data demands that can overcome a company’s infrastructure. According to a post on Venture Beat, IDC estimates that companies store 500 billion gigabytes of data today and that will double every 18 months.
People are communicating via their smart phones and portable devices in addition to the work done in the office. With a spike, a company can find itself with its network down.
The new servers also represent a new generation of hardware that is designed to save on power consumption and cooling, major costs associated with data centers.
According to Dell, the PowerEdge C-Series servers come in three basic models:
- PowerEdge C1100: This is a high-memory, power-efficient, cluster-optimized compute node server
- PowerEdge C2100: High performance data analytics, cloud compute platform and cloud storage server
- PowerEdge C6100: 4-node cloud and cluster optimized shared infrastructure server
The servers run on Intel’s quad-core Xeon 5500 and six-core Xeon 5600 processors.
