March 2009 - Direct2Dell

Last week, Michael was in Japan and China, meet with customers, business leaders and government officials. He also delivered a speech to international reporters during a press conference in Beijing. In the eight-minute video below, Michael discussed how IT-driven innovation can help companies improve efficiency and productivity and get ready for an economic recovery. He also referenced Dell's 28% unit growth in China for FY09, compared with 7% for the rest of the industry.  Check out the video and tell us your thoughts.

In the post from last week, Steve Felice explains how small and medium businesses can benefit from our newest enterprise solutions. When smaller companies grow, the necessary technology changes often fall into the hands of the president or CEO. Even if you do have an IT Manager or consultant, it’s important, as an entrepreneur, to understand why upgrading your servers can lift business efficiency in a down economy.

To better understand how our new streamlined enterprise solutions could benefit some of our mid-sized customers, we asked ScaleMP to ‘test-drive’ our PowerEdge™ M610 blade server. ScaleMP is a leading provider of virtualization for high-end computing, experiencing major growth as a company (Linux Magazine recently named them one of the top 20 Companies to Watch in 2009).

Their software product vSMP Foundation is used to replace the custom hardware and components that make traditional symmetric multiprocessors expensive. vSMP Foundation can aggregate up to 16 x86 systems to create a single system with 4 to 32 processors (128 cores) and up to 1 TB of shared memory. Their widgetry also simplifies clustering infrastructure with a single operating system.

As a company providing a simplified virtualization solution, ScaleMP needed improved performance from their own servers to better scale their technology. Shai Fultheim, ScaleMP’s Founder and CEO told us that the performance increase delivered by the M610 blade servers meant a significant and quick return on investment for their customers.

With the new servers and software, ScaleMP not only saw an amazing performance improvement over the previous generation of servers but made the total IT solution easier to manage and use. The ScaleMP and Dell solution they now can offer customers affords them more time and resources to start doing new things. For Shai Fultheim, working with Dell on these servers helps his company innovate with other businesses to make advances in the High Performance Computing (HPC) frontier.

Today, Intel introduced the Xeon (R)  5500 series processor, known recently in the industry by its code name Nehalem.

We characterize the Xeon 5500 as the most important server technology launch for Intel since the introduction of the Pentium Pro processer in 1995. Pentium Pro was optimized for servers, and helped create the standard high-volume server market. We believe the Xeon 5500 represents the same scale of technology advance, and will be equally transformative in growth markets like cloud infrastructure and high performance computing. Not only does the Xeon 5500 deliver stunning performance gains – 1.7 to 2.25 times the performance of the prior generation across a range of workloads – but it includes critical features enabling the processor to intelligently adapt to diverse requirements automatically. Capabilities like Turbo Mode, Power Gating, and Extended Page tables deliver results for workloads that are highly threaded or frequency sensitive, power constrained or performance sensitive, native or virtualized. You can learn more about the Xeon 5500 processors in Intel's Server Room.

Dell’s history in the server business has many parallels with Intel’s history delivering server technology. The first Dell PowerEdge servers were introduced in 1994, and by the late 90s Dell was already one of the market leaders in the server business.

Concurrent with our launch of the Xeon 5500 series processor, Dell is today announcing their 11^th generation of PowerEdge servers. While I’m excited about the Xeon 5500 and related platform components from Intel, I believe industry innovation at a system and solution level is even more important for customers. The ingredients enable capabilities, while the system solutions unlock the capability to deliver real world value.

Dell’s 11^th generation PowerEdge servers exemplify this innovation. A great example is power management – Dell’s Energy Smart Management solutions take full advantage of the power flexibility of the Xeon 5500 and put fine grain control of power consumption in the hands of the customer. Dell has also delivered significant advances for virtualized workloads. Dell’s new servers build upon Xeon 5500 optimizations with embedded hypervisors, up to 125 percent increased memory footprint and more integrated I/O. The numbers in widely accepted benchmarks tell the story. Dell has a full list of their benchmarks achievements here.

Dell has a huge focus on simplifying IT for customers. After almost 20 years in the industry, I know that making technology simple for customers requires some of the most innovative thinking. Dell challenges Intel every day to help deliver on the promise of simplicity. I believe Intel’s close collaboration with Dell has brought the best out of both companies.

I’d like to congratulate Dell on the 11^th generation server launch. I expect your hard work and innovation to be well-received by your customers.

Today in China, we’re introducing a couple of new desktops with a splash of color. The new Inspiron desktops will come in two different case options: mini-tower and slim. Both versions can be ordered in any of the following eight colors: Piano Black, Pure White, True Blue, Formula Red, Tangerine Orange, Spring Green, Plum Purple and Promise Pink.

These Inspiron slim and mini-tower desktops make their debut in China today. Customers there can purchase through Dell.com, distributor Digital China or retailers Suning and Gome. These systems will be available worldwide (including the United States) later this spring.

These new desktops support a range of AMD and Intel processors, and that means they’ll be great for all kinds of common things people use computers for these days—basics like e-mail, blogging  or web applications to other things like digital entertainment (music, photos and movies) and casual gaming.

Basically, they’ll bring versatility and value just like our other Inspiron products, they’ll just do it with a little more style.

Click on the image below to see a larger version or check out the additional pictures available on Dell's Flickr page.

Two years ago, Dell went into the virtual world of Second Life to begin learning about this new environment and to prepare for the 3D web that many say is coming one day. But, a quick look around and you see that 3D is already here!

Rapid Growth of 3D Movies

In 2007, it was anticipated by Slashfilm.com that at least five feature films would be released in 3D in 2008 and that the amount would nearly double in 2009. Those numbers actually came in higher, and it's no wonder when Screen Digest reports that digital 3D cinema is delivering three times the revenue per screen of its 2D counterpart. With a six-year-old of my own, I know many of those movies have been targeted at kids who make it pretty hard to resist paying the extra price 3D commands.

So, when I saw that Robert Rodriguez and Henry Selick were speaking on a panel about 3D at SXSW Film, I slipped away from the Interactive portion of the conference to listen in on it. Robert can take much of the credit for the current revival in 3D movies when he brought it back for "Spy Kids 3D." And Henry has really advanced the use of 3D as more than a gimmick with the way he used it to tell the story of "Coraline."

Robert Rodriguez at SXSW Film courtesy of CC Chapman

This is Not Your 1950s 3D

While "Spy Kids 3D" was Robert's first 3D movie released, it was not the first time he wanted to use the technology. He mentioned in the panel that he actually wanted to make the second half of "From Dusk Til Dawn" in 3D - just imagine all those vampires coming right at you! Unfortunately, at that time, the camera equipment was too large to enable the shots he wanted, so he had to wait for technology to catch up.

And catch up it has done indeed. The steroscopic high-definition 3D that is now offered in digital theaters is nothing like the anaglyph 3D from those 1950s classics like "Creature from the Black Lagoon." Anaglyph can be characterized by the old red/blue glasses you had to wear to see the combination of two images shot from different perspectives that are to be viewed independently by each eye. High-definition 3D is the next generation and Dell is actively contributing to the establishment of format standards for it through our involvement with The Blu-ray Disc Association. While you will still need (much more stylish) glasses to view this format, you could be doing so from the comfort of your home.

3D Gaming Opportunity

Televisions with 3D DLP already exist, and new 3D monitors were showcased at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), along with an interactive tool to measure game quality when played in stereoscopic 3D. Nvidia announced their GeForce3D Vision at the Consumer Electronics Show in January this year to rave reviews for the "much more immersive depth of field than you get from standard 3D games."

Gaming and virtual worlds hold a big opportunity for 3D in the home because nearly all PC games already have built into them depth information needed.  Soon you can even take your 3D virtual world mobile - a company from Tokyo announced last week that they have a new application for the iPhone that allows messaging with Second Life and they're working on a graphical 3D environment for it too.

What the Future Holds

So with all this new 3D popping up everywhere, a logical question someone asked at the SXSW Film panel was whether the directors felt this was all just a fad that would fade out as 3D did after the 1950s.

Henry said he feels that as long as people resist the urge to use it simply as a gimmick, but rather focus on how best to leverage the immersive qualities of it, it should be here to stay for much longer. "'The Wrestler' doesn't need to be made in 3D," he joked.

As more and more movie theaters convert to digital projection, high-definition 3D makes its way into the home and the technology continues to advance, I agree that this return of 3D is here to stay.