Customer

In most cases, electronics and liquids do not mix. We’ve all had incidents that prove this. I’ve knocked over a glass of wine on my keyboard. It died, but I like to think it died happy with a belly full of Bordeaux. When my toddler ran into a pool I dove after him with my smart phone in my pocket. I wasn’t able to call home to complain about that one. I’ve clung to my digital camera with a death grip for fear that one unexpected toss of the boat would cast thousands of memories in the form of digital images from the palm of my hand to the bottom of the ocean floor.

But, sometimes putting electronics out to sea is the best thing you can do for your business. Geotrace, a leading seismic processing and imaging company based in Houston, packed the power of a data center into the hull of a ship to speed oil and gas exploration. The Geowave Endeavor, the ship that Geotrace deploys for 3D Seismic production, has a Dell PowerEdge M-series blade server high performance computing cluster on board. They have sixteen a fully-loaded Dell M1000e blade chassis that house a total of 256 Dell M600 blade servers networked with Dell PowerConnect M6220 Ethernet switches. Now that’s a boat load of servers.

I had a chance to catch up with Matt Gaskamp, Geotrace’s data center operations manager, briefly last week. He explained that having the ability to analyze and process information while off shore has given his company a significant edge over the competition. Previously, data collected while at sea could not be processed until the ship returned to shore. Now, Dell blade servers and workstations, software, and services allow Geotrace engineers to analyze the data as soon as it is gathered offshore, which has eliminated at minimum two months of wait time for its customers.

Energy efficiency is a concern with any data center, but it is especially important when it’s all housed on a ship. Geotrace uses Dell Remote Access Controllers and Dell OpenManage software to manage the blades remotely. It has power management tools that let their administrators easily configure maximum power thresholds by server or server group. To increase the energy efficiency of the servers while at sea Geotrace administrators can reset peak observed watts/amps and cumulative power, regulate and manage the fixed power supply aboard the ship.

The folks at Geotrace were kind enough to supply us with images of the Geowave Endeavor and the HPC cluster aboard the Endeavor, which is currently off the coast of Libya. You can view other images of the installation at Dell's Flickr pool. We also have a full case study on the Geotrace HPCC implementation if you'd like to read more.

Dr. Reza Rooholamini, director of enterprise solutions engineering group for Dell, recently wrote an article with that headline appearing in The Financial Times. To me the headline sounds like an extension of the movie The Matrix, but maybe that's just me. (Personal note: Perhaps I'm one of the few people that didn't see that movie, though I often have people address me as "MISTERRRRRRR. ANDERSONNNNNN!").

In the article, Guido Russo from Italy's University of Naples points out the challenges he faces in his research but adds that his university is now able to afford high performance computers that greatly ease these issues. Russo is but one of thousands of individuals and organizations that are benefiting from the increased accessibility of high-performance computing. Click over the article when you have a few minutes - it's a good read on this area of the tech world.

So, the answer to the question first posed? Probably not. While NEC is currently working on a a computer that would perform at 10 petaflops, the system will cost about $1.8 billion and will still perform at half the power of the human brain. And I would imagine it would draw far greater power than the 20 watts required of my brain as I type these words.

The Planet, the world's largest privately held dedicated hosting company, recently deployed the first PowerEdge R710 servers, based on Intel's Xeon 5500 series processors. I was able to join a team of my Dell colleagues who were on hand to observe the company's IT personnel un-boxing the new systems and deploying them in their Houston-based data center. While we were there, the company was also deploying them in their Dallas data center, for a total of more than 80 PowerEdge R710 systems being put onto the grid.

The Planet serves more than 20,000 businesses worldwide, with about 40 percent of those located outside of North America. They have standardized on Dell PowerEdge servers and have about 56,000 of them in six data centers powering more than 17 million websites worldwide.

I had the opportunity to talk to Urvish Vashi, general manager for The Planet's Dedicated Server Hosting business. In our discussion, he talked about the strong design elements of Dell's new PowerEdge servers that address power and cooling issues and take advantage of the power of the new Intel processors. The entire team had discussions with The Planet's Jon Lowe, who manages operations for the company's two Houston data centers. He talked about some of the design elements that made the deployment of the servers much faster than they anticipated, specifically new rail designs that enable simple installation and easy access.

In this video, Urvish provides an overview of The Planet, what their customers expect of them and their growth challenges.

Have you seen the latest?  Storage Magazine ranked Dell the #1 midrange array provider in service and reliability.  With our acquisition of EqualLogic, we turned last-year’s 9^th place ranking into a #1 ranking in product reliability and initial product quality.  Hopefully, you didn’t miss Dell’s other recent achievement where Gartner recognized Dell as a leader in Midrange Disk Arrays for their Magic Quadrant 2008.

Dell has made a tradition out of listening to you, our customers.  In turn, you’ve rewarded us with your support.  We’re excited to be plugged in, so we can keep building storage solutions you want.

Thanks for all of your feedback.

Earlier this week, TBR (Technology Business Research) released its most recent Q4 Customer Satisfaction Survey for servers and Dell moved into sole leadership position, unseating HP and widening it's lead over IBM (see chart at right).

The results reflect improving, and positive, customer perceptions of Dell’s server and related services capabilities, and indicate progress we've made as we continue to focus intently on our customers as well as many of the attributes that this study represents. According to the study, Dell’s No. 1 ranking was bolstered by three critical competitive advantages: overall server value, parts availability and ease of doing business. Dell also excelled in areas of delivery time and phone support. Commentary in the report echoes our commitment to customers, saying, “Dell is now beginning to show some progress in boosting its image as a solutions provider in an age where customers are looking for this guidance from Dell.”

Thank you, Dell customers, for your input that resulted in this recognition. We know that each and every day we need to earn your business.

We had the opportunity to get some thoughts on the report from Jan Uhrich, a long-tenured enterprise executive and now Dell's vice president of Enterprise Support Services for the company's Public Business.

Have a listen.