Skip to main content

Microsoft's Azure has Dell's iron in its Data Centers

Yesterday at the CloudCamp, Microsoft's Belgium Evangelist did show us pics of the Microsoft Data Centers and did admit that it was Dell, they were using in containers, each container packed with 2500 Servers! (and about several hundred containers then).

To build the Azure data center, Microsoft has engaged Dell's Data Center Solutions division, an independent unit of the company - which has its own research, design, manufacturing, marketing, and sales employees - that was expressly created in the spring of 2006 to chase the cloud computing-Web 2.0-utility computing opportunity. DCS makes custom servers tuned for specific workloads and data center power and cooling envelopes. It does not sell standard PowerEdge iron and PowerVault storage.

According to Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager of the unit, this small piece of Dell has close to 200 employees and is chasing 30 cloudy customers (including the brass ring called Google). While the DCS unit doesn't break out sales, Norrod says that in the second quarter of 2008, if DCS was broken out as a separate company, it would have ranked among the top five server shippers in the world. At the very least, that is tens of thousands of servers. Ironically, the whole DCS approach is the absolute antithesis of the "standardize and sell direct" approach that put Dell on the map in PCs and made it a player in servers.

According to a Dell spokesperson, the company has won the sole server and storage hardware deal for the Azure platform, and this involves more than a few racks of servers, too. (Exactly how much, Dell is not at liberty to say, and Web 2.0-style companies, as Microsoft is trying to become, get all kinds of nervous about the competitive advantage their data centers give them and don't tend to share the details).


Source
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Security: VMware Workstation 6 vulnerability

vulnerable software: VMware Workstation 6.0 for Windows, possible some other VMware products as well type of vulnerability: DoS, potential privilege escalation I found a vulnerability in VMware Workstation 6.0 which allows an unprivileged user in the host OS to crash the system and potentially run arbitrary code with kernel privileges. The issue is in the vmstor-60 driver, which is supposed to mount VMware images within the host OS. When sending the IOCTL code FsSetVoleInformation with subcode FsSetFileInformation with a large buffer and underreporting its size to at max 1024 bytes, it will underrun and potentially execute arbitrary code. Security focus
Post a Comment
Read more

Splunk that!

Saw this advert on Slashdot and went on to look for it and found the tour pretty neat to look at. Check out the demo too! So why would I need it? WHY NOT? I'd say. As an organization grows , new services, new data comes by, new logs start accumulating on the servers and it becomes increasingly difficult to look at all those logs, leave alone that you'd have time to read them and who cares about analysis as the time to look for those log files already makes your day, isn't it? Well a solution like this is a cool option to have your sysadmins/operators look at ONE PLACE and thus you don't have your administrators lurking around in your physical servers and *accidentally* messing up things there. Go ahead and give it a shot by downloading it and testing it. I'll give it a shot myself! Ok so I went ahead and installed it. Do this... [root@tarrydev Software]# ./splunk-Server-1.0.1-linux-installer.bin to install and this (if you screw up) [root@tarrydev Software]# /op...
Post a Comment
Read more