March 2009 - Direct2Dell

It has been years in the making, months of glimpses and speculations and today, it is here – Adamo By Dell. If you have seen the Web site, or any of the advertisements it is pretty clear that Adamo By Dell is something totally different for us, and it’s something we couldn’t be more excited about bringing to the world.

By now you know that Adamo means “to fall in love with,” but you may not have known it was actually the code name for the product while it was in development, because that is what we were striving to create – something to fall in love with. Eventually we couldn’t fathom it having any other name, it just fit.

In looking at Adamo and what it stands for, take a look at the evolution of design from Dell over the last year and you will see we’ve made huge strides, and our depth and breadth offers a great deal of personalization. Today’s announcement continues that evolution and rounds out our offerings with Adamo at the design pinnacle from Dell. I’m particularly proud of the engineering team in putting the whole package together around performance, craftsmanship, and design to create something that you will really fall in love with.

Note: Click on either of these images to see a larger version. Or you can click here to see more photos on Dell’s Official Flickr page. And here are some photos of the Pearl Adamo from Brian Solis at SXSW.

Here’s a couple of videos for those who are interested. The first StudioDell gives an overview of Dell’s first product in the Adamo line and features insight from Nicolas Denhez, the creative director of our consumer industrial design team.

And the second highlights the packaging that Adamo customers will receive.

Later today, Stephen Schuckenbrock, president of Dell’s Large Enterprise group will unveil our Efficient Enterprise Portfolio of products in a webcast that will happen today at 11:30am Central Standard Time.

You can register for the webcast by going to Dell.com/switch or by clicking on the image below.

Today Corporate Responsibility Magazine announced its 100 Best Corporate Citizens for 2009, and we’re thrilled to be included among the prestigious corporations on this list. The report evaluates companies in the Russell 1000 index based on seven key areas: environment, climate change, human rights, philanthropy, employee relations, financial and governance.

We’re proud of the commitment - and progress - we’ve made in operating responsibly.  Last week, we announced our campus in Oklahoma City is now powered with 100 percent green power.  We also recently announced our inaugural round of Dell YouthConnect grants, supporting non-profit organizations that help prepare youth in emerging economies to compete in the digital world. And we remain committed to building a diverse workforce that reflects our customers worldwide, and to ensuring that the workers throughout our supply chain are treated with the rights and dignity they deserve.

This is great progress, but there’s more to do. We’ll continue working to bring more transparency to our operations and to lead our industry with progressive policies. In a tough economic climate, our commitment to these principles is more important than ever. In the words of CRO’s publisher Jay Whithead:

“In good times, checkbook citizenship can win the day.  But in tough times, strong reputations and transparency pack as much punch as a strong balance sheet.  In today’s deep recession, human capital and financial capital seek safety—and companies on the 100 Best Corporate Citizens List® are today’s safest harbors.”

The way we operate says a lot about us as a company, and it builds trust among our partners, suppliers and customers. Keep up the great work!

The Studio One 19 is Dell’s latest all-in-one desktop system. That means the functional desktop components that make it a PC are integrated with the 18.5” display as a single unit.

We’ve worked to make it useful for everyone in the family. Though it’s a full desktop with all the performance and ports you’d expect, it’s small enough to fit in a lot of different places in the home—like the kitchen or family room.

Style is another important aspect of this desktop. It features some materials you might expect—like glass and aluminum, and some you wouldn’t—like stain-resistant fabric in several colors: Solid Pure White, Tuscan Red, Navy Blue, Powder Pink and Charcoal.

Note: Click on the images in this post to see larger versions. You can see more images here on Dell’s Official Flickr page.

The new desktop will be available initially to customers in Japan via retailers and will become available to customers in other countries in the coming weeks. Starting price for the Studio One 19 desktop is $699.

There’s plenty more to talk about with this desktop—especially on the multi-touch front. As we get closer to making it available to customers in the United States, I’ll blog more about it here on Direct2Dell.

Today I’d like to share some of what we’ve been working on in our cloud-optimized server offering.  Admittedly, I’ve been remiss on blogging about some of the interesting developments going on in the cloud technology space, but if you count yourself in the server architecture geek set: carry on, dear reader.

Early last year, we developed a revolutionary design for the folks building hyper-scaled-out platforms. We’ve evolved that design and recently began shipping a new iteration of this system – the XS-23 II.   One of the first customers to receive this new system is Lawrence Livermore National Labs who is utilizing XS-23 II for their Hyperion project.  Ashlee Vance of the New York Times got one of the first glimpses of the system during a visit this week.  

We've made several changes and improvements to the XS-23 chassis, among them some serviceability features. Our first iteration required some screw-turning for system board swap outs. While the failure/service domain of individual servers isn’t a primary concern for the true cloud applications (from which our initial design was created) - we know that serviceability is still important from a labor-savings standpoint. With that in mind, we’ve added slide-out trays for the individual servers to make removal/insertion an easier task.

On the performance side we’ve added to the unique configuration advantages this chassis offers. In its fully populated incarnation we house four 2S servers with three 3.5-inch HDD each. Over the past year we’ve offered customers the flexibility of removing a server (or two) from the chassis to bring them to a four or six 3.5-inch spindle-per-server ratio if that is what they needed. This reduces density to 1 or 1.5 servers per rack unit but carries a significant local storage subsystem advantage over other designs. Taking this flexibility a step further, in the new version of XS-23 we’ve added support for 2.5-inch HDD.   Now we can make even more granular choices on storage performance/capacity/cost tradeoffs. Where spindle count is paramount we can go to six HDD per server at 2-servers-per-U density. Not bad. Compare this to general purpose server blades where we see a max of 2 x 2.5-inch spindles at the nearest density equivalent, which for a mainstream 2S system is 1.6 servers-per-U (16 in a 10U chassis).

Another design idea, “twins,” comes closer with 4 x 2.5-inch HDD per server at that 2-per-U density point. We’ve offered a twins setup for about a year but most of our customers have opted for XS-23 instead.

Back to the XS-23 II, this system will support Intel’s Nehalem family of processors and we’ll also continue to offer other flavors (San Clemente, Seaburg) for specific applications. One of the other interesting things we’ve done recently in the XS-series was a two-server design where we replace two of the four system boards in the chassis with two monster graphics cards which are employed as co-processors. More on that later.

XS-23 is starting to look like a product family unto itself and if imitation is the highest form of flattery I’d say we’re on to something.