Dell announced today that its DCS (Dell Cloud Services) division finally shipped its 1 millionth server. For those that do not know about Dell DCS it is a division of Dell that specifically caters to cloud providers. The story here is that Dell realized that to compete with the Taiwanese ODMs it would have to adopt an alternate model versus its traditional home and enterprise sales. As a result, the company made a separate business unit organized specifically to build infrastructure for cloud providers. This is especially challenging because these massive scale-out architectures generally have much lower margins than traditional server products.
Dell put together a quick video on the topic that highlights some of the accomplishments of the DCS group and its 1,000,000 servers:
http://youtu.be/wqUrMV0qW_Q
The power consumption and space savings claims seem like they need to have a realistic baseline.
If you are reading this, then you are certainly using a Dell DCS server. This site is being run by multiple Dell PowerEdge C6100 XS23-TY3 units which, rumor has it, were from a Facebook data center decommission.
The servers certainly save on space and power. They fit 4x dual socket nodes into a 2U chassis. The four nodes share power supplies and larger, more efficient cooling fans. As a result, the multi-node/ U market has been growing at greater than 5% over the past few years. The C6100’s typically shipped with both Intel Xeon L5520 and L5639 configurations which became popular for cloud labs, dedicated/ VPS hosting and even with the crypto currency “miners” recently.
For those that want more information on the highly popular C6100 can see the Dell PowerEdge C6100 thread in the forums with well over a thousand replies just on the main thread alone.
Congratulations again to the Dell DCS group on their 1,000,000th server shipped. You can find out more here.
