Customer

Our friends at Google yesterday introduced its new Google Search Appliance (GSA) 6.0, which we're pleased to tell you is powered by Dell PowerEdge servers from Dell's OEM Industry Solutions Group (Dell OEM). Specifically, the new search appliances leverage Dell's PowerEdge R710 servers, part of Dell's 11th generation of PowerEdge servers that were introduced earlier this year.

Google is selling the search appliance to corporations as a server with enterprise search software to enable companies to index and retrieve data stored on their corporate Web systems. According to Google, the new appliance can index up to 30 million documents, which when connected with other appliances, can now search billions of corporate documents.

As Google's Cyrus Mistry points out in his post ealier today, "It's hard to conceptualize the number 1,000,000,000. One billion sheets of paper could circle the earth at the equator well over five times. Counting to one billion would take about 30 years of your life, even if you never stop to sleep. And if you had to find a single piece of information by sorting through a billion documents it would take you, on average, about 2000 years. Businesses and large organizations have tons of documents and other types of data — some even have a billion documents that need searching, and it's unlikely that employees have 2000 years to dedicate to the hunt." Um, ok, so I'd rather have an appliance looking for that 401k information I needed for my tax return.

Dell's OEM team extensively customized its next generation of PowerEdge servers that power the Google Search Appliance 6.0 for enterprise customers, making it as simple to organize and search information behind the corporate firewall as it is to use Google.com.

Rick Froehlich, vice president and general manager of Dell's OEM team, had this to say about today's announcement: “Businesses that require extensive customization, single-point contact and fulfillment, and high product quality can find the right solution with our Dell OEM team. By combining our industry-leading server platforms with best-in-class design capabilities and supply chain expertise, we helped the Google team immediately deliver a great customer experience.”

Rick's team helped drive specific aspects of the design of the PowerEdge servers to suit the unique needs of appliance solutions like the GSA. Specifically, design and function enhancements, improvements to product stability and lifecycle management support and offering top-tier quality and reliability that appliance OEMs welcome customizing with their brand.

You'll soon start hearing more about Dell's OEM activities here on Inside Enterprise IT and very soon I'll introduce you to Franklin Flint, a senior systems consultant and technology evangelist working on Rick's OEM team.

Take a minute and watch this video that Google created on the new Google Search Appliance. Good stuff.

If it’s true what they say- that the customer is always right- then our strategy of listening to you, our customers, is certainly paying off.

According to Technology Business Research’s (TBR) Q1 Customer Satisfaction Survey for Servers, Dell continues to hold the sole leadership position when measured against companies such as HP and IBM.  The report states, “after achieving substantially improved satisfaction scores .... Dell did not give any of that up in 1Q09, thus continuing Dell’s role as the most improved performer of the year in TBR’s study.” In addition to Servers, Dell currently holds the No. 1 position for customer satisfaction in notebooks and desktop systems.

The report also gives a nod to our continued efforts around providing business solutions to our customers when it states that “Dell has clearly shown remarkable progress in boosting its image as a solutions provider at a time when its customers are looking for guidance.”

In addition to these results, another vendor rated Dell’s customer service as the best - Telemark’s latest survey of large enterprise users across the globe highlights that Dell’s customer service was rated among the best. The ICT (Information and Communications Technology) survey evaluates customer satisfaction based on feedback from 1,000 ICT buyers and end users. In a close comparison and analysis of Dell to 23 other ICT suppliers, including HP and IBM, Dell saw particularly high marks in server and storage support ratings.

Results like these are particularly important at Dell. We believe that through customer feedback, we are able to grow and evolve our solutions for increased efficiency and customer satisfaction. We hear you and will continue to listen, learn, and build from valued customer feedback in hopes of achieving even better results next time around. This is great acknowledgement and we are pleased to see our efforts are paying off, but we’re not satisfied and will continue to put the customer first in everything we do and hopefully continue to earn this recognition.

So, to our customers reading this post, on behalf of Dell, thank you! We know there is always more to do but we appreciate your feedback.

I spent a few minutes yesterday talking to Theodore Gray, who along with Dr. Stephen Wolfram, founded Wolfram Research in 1988. The company has made quite a few headlines recently with the launch of their newest project, Wolfram Alpha, a computational knowledge engine.

Before I get into Wolfram's latest news, let me tell you a little about Theo. In addition to co-founding Wolfram Research, he is responsible for the graphical user interface of Mathematica, Wolfram Research's other widely successful software program that is used in universities and companies around the world. In 2002, he was awarded an Ig Nobel prize in Chemistry for his Wooden Periodic Table Table. He also has written a column for Popular Science since 2003 about chemistry and blowing things up, and just last month launched a book called Mad Science - Experiments You Can Do at Home -- But Probably Shouldn't, a collection of his columns.

Theo was very clear that while journalists and users are quick to compare Wolfram Alpha to traditional search engines like Google, Ask Jeeves and Microsoft Live Search, and others suggest is more similar to Wikipedia, in reality it is a completely different type of online tool. As Theo tells me in this interview, "It is not a search engine...it is really quite different."

I did a little "research" myself that probably didn't cause the PowerEdge server powering the Wolfram Alpha supercomputer too much strain.

I entered a simple term that represents something many of you may have pondered: what is the weight of a gallon of milk? Having been raised on a dairy farm in Northern Illinois, I always knew that the weight of a gallon of milk was approximately eight-and-a-half pounds. I entered "weight of gallon of milk" into Wolfram Alpha and it generated a data table that showed it weighed nine pounds (must be rounded up), but also unit conversions, serving density and volume.

On Google I found this result, Ask Jeeves gave me this and Microsoft Live Search gave me this -- all search results that were generated when the search engines went out to the World Wide Web, looked for meta-data and keywords that would suggest a page had something to do with the weight of a gallon of milk. So you'll see links to all sorts of websites that propose to answer that question or discuss it in some way.

Wolfram Alpha, on the other hand, actually taps into a number of data pools and produces data that are related to the words entered into the text box. So, the server infrastructure required to power the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine is significant as it is actually crunching numbers, data, to deliver to the user an answer to their query.

Theo is quick to point out that they are learning new information every time someone enters a term and over time the site will get better and better. But the cool thing now is that if you're a Firefox user, they have just added a plug-in that allows you to see Wolfram Alpha results pasted JavaScript-style into the right-hand side of your Google results page. So now it's easy for you to get your Google and Wolfram Alpha information all in one search.

Have a listen.

A few days ago, I had the opportunity to participate in a round table discussion about simplifying IT and the benefits it can bring to organisations worldwide. Together with members of the specialised press and Nicolas Laarman, vice president of Atari’s worldwide management information systems, we exchanged views on the current expectations of CIOs, concentrating on how IT is no longer just a cost centre, but a key business enabler, creating strategic advantages for each organisation -- especially critical in the current economic environment. CIOs and IT managers must move with the times and help their clients through the changes to come.

Our discussion made it clear that today CIOs are expected to do more with less. They must create faster, more-efficient IT environments with fewer financial resources. Research shows that many organisations spend 70 percent of their IT budget on maintenance alone, with only 30 percent left for innovation on new projects. CIOs are forced to find new, economical solutions to maintain systems, allowing them to redistribute the remaining finances on other projects. According to Christian Lakomski, director of IT simplification for Dell France, Dell’s objective is to help CIOs eliminate all preventable complexity linked to operations and maintenance.

Dell helps organisations identify their strong and weak points and works with them to establish improved solutions that can be used over the long term. Despite recent IDC figures stating a five percent  decrease in server sales in 2009, we believe that technologies such as virtualisation are a real groundswell opportunity that is only just starting to prove its strengths. 

It was inspiring to hear Nicolas Laarman describe how Atari was able to streamline their operations through virtualisation.

According to Nicolas, Atari chose to work with Dell for five reasons:

1. The extensive availability of a team of experts;
2. A tailor-made project plan;
3. The step-by-step follow through of the project;
4. Dell’s strong quality to price ratio and, finally;
5. The integrated training of in-house teams regarding project up-keep and maintenance.

Atari was both appreciative of Dell’s effectiveness and the large network of strong partner relationships, which enabled Atari to profit from the new measures of cost control. Atari’s case is a perfect example of a company that took advantage of Dell’s commitment to helping organisations simplify and save by removing excess cost and complexity in order to continue innovating within the IT industry.

For another example of successful simplification and saving in IT, you can read MedNetwoRx’s customer perspective here.

The super computing market has undergone huge changes over the past four years and is now a technology open to a broad base of researchers. This is relevant to all of us because it has enabled complicated research involving modeling or analysis to be completed in a fraction of the time and money, and in ways that were not possible before. Advances in many areas such as physics, chemistry, economics and medial research rely on this technology.

Last week I caught up with Dr. Paul Calleja, Director HPC Services, from Cambridge University. Paul and his team manage a large world-class research cluster to provide central compute power to hundreds of users spread across fifteen departments. At the time it was launched in 2006, the Dell HPC solution was the fastest academic supercomputer in the country and according to Top500, ranked in the top 50 of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

As public sector and commercial sector money is increasingly under scrutiny, broadening the affordability and removing the complexity from High Performance Cluster technology is a key area Dell is helping customers with. I asked Paul a few questions about how the Dell HPC solution is run at Cambridge including his financial model, service and performance goals.

We went on to talk about how similar services could be used in the commercial sector as well as key metrics used to judge the fitness of an HPC system as user demand grows.