Copying a page from their PC strategy for x86 servers and storage
Newsweek’s Roger Kay makes a convincing case for Dell as a serious contender in the server space. And they’re doing it Dell Style - coming up from below, more direct in many ways than HP.
They’ve got a lot of momentum:
Strong success supplying Microsoft’s datacenters
A filled-out server line up
Services that help customers adapt Dell servers to their applications
Data Center Services (DCS) - a cloud-building unit with Yahoo, Facebook and Baidu as customers
Why is this important to a historically PC-centric company? Roger sees it:
Desktops tend to yield gross margins in the 8% to 12% range, and notebooks hit 12% to 18%; servers come in at a much fatter 18% to 26%.
Servers supporting Web 2.0 are very real - and very costly
Business Week reports that Facebook’s new pile of cash will be used to buy servers. They currently have 10,000; they’ll get 50,000 more. Yet they’re way behind Google and MSN in the computing arms race.
In Web 2.0 terms, servers mean storing as much as processing. Traditionally servers were all about crunching the numbers. Even today, high-end servers doing the transactional heavy lifting in businesses of all types rely on the fastest disk drives - even enterprise SSDs - but require little capacity.
Changing IT as we know it
Facebook’s investment is a stark example of how hardware in general and storage in particular are a very necessary part of our growing cyber communities.
These are early days. Expect continued acceleration in these kinds of investments, and watch for the consequences of such a large techno-economic shift.
The Seagate Cheetah 15K.6 drive has higher performance and lower power consumption
There’s been lots of talk in the blogs about how SSDs are the future for performance storage in the enterprise. Absolutely! But that future is years away for broad adoption.
15K drives now, SSDs later
Today, 15K disk drives are powering the performance servers out there. Glad to see Seagate is upping the ante on what these drives can do.
Seagate’s new Cheetah 15K.6 has 28% faster data transfers and uses 61% less power at idle. This is incremental, Moore’s Law-ish progress, just what is needed for transaction-strained servers and storage systems.
Hard to believe that performance15K drives now go up to 450GB!
Has anyone tested this drive yet?
I’m watching for reviews of this product…anyone had a chance to test it yet?
I’m in Los Angeles at the Microsoft Server 2008 launch. I’ve heard lots of positive buzz around Server 2008 from system builders playing with it, developing with it. The product seems to be more mature than typical Microsoft releases at launch time - it even has SP1 included already.
I’m looking forward to hearing Steve Ballmer speak, partially because I’m kind of new to attending large Microsoft events and have yet to hear him in person.
Tony Pearson pointed to a cogent 4-minute video from ZD Net UK on server virtualization with Dan Chu of VMWare. If you’ve wondered what all the fuss is about but were afraid to ask, here’s your chance.
