Dell has announced that it has launched a Data Center Solutions (DCS) division which will focus on designing and customizing data centers. The service is geared to help customers lower their energy costs and increase their equipment efficiency, particularly for business requiring hyper-scale computing environments such as Web 2.0 firms or Internet search engines.

“The infrastructure requirements of Web 2.0 companies are distinctive and differ in many ways from the needs of traditional enterprise IT customers,” said Matt Eastwood, program vice president for IDC’s Enterprise Platforms Group. “Dell recognizes that these customers have unique compute density, power density and manageability needs and the Data Center Solutions Division has been created to offer this growing customer segment access to IT infrastructure solutions tailored for their unique business requirements.”

“Businesses requiring hyper-scale computing environments – where infrastructure deployments are measured by up to millions of servers, storage and networking equipment – are changing the way they approach IT to drive revenue growth and decrease operational expenses,” said Brad Anderson, senior vice president, Dell Product Group. “Our unique customer interaction, global reach and speed to market position Dell to offer a total ‘design-to-order’ package, optimized for each customer’s needs. We’re maximizing the performance of their IT infrastructure and providing tangible value to this growing market segment where IT is not just a business factor, it’s a business driver.”

The division will optimize entire datacenters with the best power and cooling, networking, motherboards, form factors and packaging, said Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager of DCS.

“By custom designing hardware and service, Dell engineering enables these customers to optimize the performance of their IT infrastructure for their particular applications,” a Dell spokesperson said. “It’s a new level of customer engagement and intimacy that enables DCS to provide complete, customized solutions specific to the needs of these customers.”

Dell hopes to sell the service to the top dozen or two dozen largest Web-based companies, Norrod said.

Despite the small number of customers, the market sector is quite large. The top two dozen companies alone buy nearly 10 percent of servers by volume, and are growing fast, he said. Potential customers include government, academic institutions, finance firms, petroleum producers, online retailers and major Internet players such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Dell has already enrolled about a dozen customers and has shipped prototype or production-level equipment to half of them. However, Norrod declined to name any of Dell’s dozen customers.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, March 28th, 2007 at 2:08 pm under Technology.

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