September 2007 - Direct2Dell

You've seen the details on Engadget. You might have seen the promotional video we released on YouTube. Today, our XPS M1730 gaming notebook—the machine our development team calls the beast—is available for order in most regions today. We will offer it to customers in Latin America later this year.

So, what makes it a gaming machine?

• It supports the latest Intel processors, including the Core 2 Extreme X7900 processor overclocked to 3.2GHz (Bin+2).
• It supports dual NVIDIA GeForce Go 8700M GT graphics cards in SLI mode.
• All models come with a bright 17" Ultrasharp 1920x1200 display with a 7ms response time.
• It's the first notebook in the world to support AGEIA PhysX 100M mobile physics card.
• It supports two hard drives in a RAID 0 or 1 configuration
• It's the first notebook we've shipped that integrates Logitech's GamePanel LCD, which displays stats and in-game details for a growing list of game titles.
• It also features a full-sized backlit keyboard that has a 10-key number pad

I've seen some stories like this one from Anandtech mentioning that there are only a few titles out there that support the PhysX card. Customers who order it will receive a copy of one of those games—Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2. There's more games coming that will also support the card: Unreal Tournament 3, Warmonger, and one that I'm really looking forward to called Crysis.

Update 9-28: Direct2Dell reader Keith correctly pointed out that Crysis will not have PhysX support. My mistake for the oversite—sorry about that. I'm still looking forward to it in November though. LM

To accommodate all these hardware options, this machine is big. It's thick too, and that's because the NVIDIA 8700M GT card can be swapped out for the next-generation SLI card later this year. We begin taking orders today and expect to ship most orders within 10 days from the time the order is processed.

The XPS M1730 unveiling will be part of Dell's activities during the DigitalLife event September 27 - 30 in New York City. Dell and Alienware are sponsoring an on-site gaming tournament there, and Valve Software's Gabe Newell will also show off some content from their upcoming compilation called The Orange Box.

Update 9:30a.m.—Louis Bruno, who's a gamer and also one of the service program managers for XPS desktops and notebooks, provides an inside look at the XPS M1730.

Today, Michael addressed more than 200 industry leaders, government officials and non-governmental organization (NGO) representatives about the perils that IT complexity holds for businesses and organizations, and the benefits that come with simplifying IT in terms of productivity, energy efficiency and the environment. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)-sponsored discussion was held at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, D.C.

During the discussion, Michael outlined policy recommendations global leaders could adapt to help both governments and businesses become greater environmental stewards. He also shared Dell's latest environmental goal—to make Dell the first major computer company to neutralize the carbon impact of its worldwide operations. 

There's been some community debate around an IdeaStorm idea about carbon neutrality from user smotchberry. Carbon Neutrality involves taking inventory of our total greenhouse gas emissions related to the operation of Dell facilities and implementing strategies to reduce and eliminate those emissions. We will be driving additional energy-efficiency in our operations, maximizing purchases of renewable power and offsetting remaining impacts. In addition to neutralizing the impact of the operation of our facilities, we will also be neutralizing the impacts of employee business air travel.

Dell's working with a team of environmental stakeholders to help shape our offset strategy so that we identify opportunities for offset investments that can be monitored and verified.

This is all part of Dell's broader climate strategy that I blogged about in June. In addition to neutralizing the impact of Dell operations, we continue to require suppliers to account for and report the emissions impacts of their operations, the first step in a long-term goal of helping suppliers reduce emissions  And we remain committed to providing  energy-efficient products. When we sell products that use less energy, we are helping cut emissions associated with the production of electricity those products need.

In this vlog, Dane Parker, director of Dell's Environmental Health & Safety group, talks about what Dell is already doing to improve energy savings. He's followed by the Environmental Policy Analyst for Dell's Sustainable Business, Mark Newton, who discusses Dell's focus on energy-efficient products and explains how we are working with suppliers to improve energy requirements on the supply chain side in the future.

Michael also introduced "Plant a Forest for Me" today, an extension of our "Plant a Tree for Me" program that enables organizations to join efforts to offset carbon impacts associated with the use of IT products and to support sustainably managed reforestation projects.  Founding partners include ABN AMRO, AMD, Ask.com, Salesforce.com and WellPoint.  We look forward to working with other organizations who want to join this important effort.

In last week's post and video, Glenn made it clear that simplifying IT was the core of our focus in the enterprise space. Our goal is to make IT technology easier to use and more affordable so that more business can take advantage of it. Today's launch of the PowerVault MD3000i is an example of that focus.

Earlier today, Michael and other Dell executives talked about how small and medium businesses are seeing exponential growth in their storage requirements. That's where iSCSI technology comes in. It is a protocol that transmits SCSI commands over an Ethernet network. In our view, iSCSI is a low-cost alternative to Fibre Channel-based storage products that still offers many of its benefits. 

iSCSI is not new to Dell's storage line—we blogged about it soon after we began offering it as an option on our mid-range Dell|EMC CX3 SAN products for a while now. However, by implementing it into the MD3000i, we're focused on making the technology accessible to many more small and medium business customers since their needs in storage continues to grow very quickly.

In this vlog, Steve Arrington from the PowerVault storage team discusses the MD3000i in more detail and shows off some of the management capabilities that are possible in our storage manager software.

 As I hinted in my last post here, a rather large 2D web project has been taking my focus away from 3D initiatives lately. That project is a redesign of the home page of Dell.com.

How can one single web page be a big project?  When it's a page that gets more than 35 million visitors a week.  When it is the subject of some of the most popular posts on IdeaStorm. When that one page is the entryway to both a corporate and a commerce site. When it must appeal to everyone from individual consumers to large corporate clients, from institutional investors to mainstream media and citizen journalists. When it has to be a place where a student can research a company for their freshman business action lawsuit, and purchase a computer upon which to write that same paper.

This is the challenge faced as we roll out a  beta test of a new design today in the United States. Canada will follow next week. More regions will offer the beta in the future. Here's how it will work: 20% of visitors to Dell.com over the next week will be randomly selected for this beta test. 10% of that test audience will see the page as it is today. The other 10 % will see the redesigned page.  We will then compare clickstream data and basic metrics from those two groups to determine if the new page works or not.

How will we know if it works? If customers tell us it is easier to find the right level of information they need-whether that means finding support for existing products or researching information for future purchases, or adding to the conversation. We don't want to be an Irrelevant Corporate Website. To us, that means integrating community sites such as this blog, the Dell Community Forum, StudioDell and more. Customers like jorge are telling us the same thing on IdeaStorm.

Click on the image below to see a larger version of the screenshot. 

What the redesign doesn't do is what many have voted for—eliminate customer segmentation. We still believe segmentation offers benefits for the customer and here's one reason why: when we have discussions with customers many of them say they dislike being asked to segment themselves when they begin shopping on dell.com; but, many also tell us that they use technology in very different ways and have different needs.  An example of this is a recent survey of small business owners and decision makers conducted by Dell and the International Council for Small Business.  This sort of feedback went into the development of the new Vostro line of notebooks and desktops, as well as the suite of services designed specifically to support small businesses.  As Dell continues to differentiate the products and services we offer our customers, segmentation will begin to make more sense to site visitors.

So, if you visit Dell.com over the next week and see the new design, feel free to click on the "feedback" link at the footer of the page to let us know what you think.  Or, you can come back here and share your comments on this post.  I look forward to hearing even more opinions on this challenging page.

To most folks that work with servers and storage on a regular basis, virtualization is a familiar concept. Kevin Kettler blogged about it in the early days of Direct2Dell. For those of you that aren't, it basically allows a customer to partition off subsystems of a server (processing power, memory, networking bandwidth, storage, etc) to perform as a virtual machine to run a unique application or operating system. The benefit is that it provides flexibility and much higher levels of server utilization. Historically, though, it takes some time to set up or to reconfigure virtual servers.

What do we mean by simplifying IT? Take a look at this vlog, where David Schmidt, manager of the Virtualization Solutions Engineering team provides a preview of the demo system that Mark Jarvis and Diane Greene used at VMworld.  See their keynote here (registration required). More details coming over the next few months.