Dell EMC DSS 9000 with Intel Rack Scale Design Launched

Dell EMC DSS 9000 is a new hyper-scale style infrastructure based on Intel Rack Scale Design. We discussed Intel RSD last year. The basic premise is that as organizations transition to private and hybrid-cloud infrastructure, Intel and Dell EMC believe that there is a better way than standard 1U and 2U servers. Instead, as systems are built in units of a rack rather than a 1U server they can be designed more efficiently.

With the switch to software defined data centers, this is ever more important as we see companies like Facebook offering internal users several standard types of instances. Oftentimes, these large scale design principles trickle down to the general enterprise market. For example, the 2U 4-node designs common now were driven largely by companies like Facebook and Twitter many years ago. As such, it is great to see how Dell EMC is bringing this type of design philosophy to more organizations.

Dell EMC DSS 9000

Dell EMC notched three notable carrier wins with the Dell EMC DSS 9000, CenturyLink, Sprint, and Telefonica. Along with the customer testimonials (that, of course, say the DSS 9000 is great), Dell EMC also provided a few videos about the new infrastructure. Here is a look at the hardware:

https://youtu.be/1Zzq7YpWJqk

Here you can see that the Dell EMC DSS 9000 has RU dedicated to hot swap power supplies so that they do not need to be present in each chassis. One can also see the common compute and storage platforms in the infrastructure. Cooling is highlighted since Dell EMC can right-size the fans to the shared chassis and the company does not have to have a power supply with each server.

The Dell EMC DSS 9000 can fit up to 96 Intel Xeon Scalable nodes per rack. It is also using management based on the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Redfish which is a major step for the new standard. The company also highlights the ability to utilize different network fabrics with the DSS 9000 for greater flexibility. Many companies who utilize designs like this have very specific fabrics that they want to use. As Dell EMC has grown, it is great to see that networking is still not set in stone.

Here is a quick video from Dell EMC about the RSD management for a more marketing overview than we previously published:

https://youtu.be/F5AeqQBbCQE