Design

Omar Sultan from Cisco wrote yesterday about the importance of broadening the skills set among data center workers.  Here's an excerpt:

I believe that the IT infrastructure and the IT organization need to be mirrors of each other. I don’t think you can successfully transform your data center while clinging to existing notions of organizational structure (i.e. network gal, server guy). Some of our more forward thinking customers have seen good results by integrating into “critical teams” that span technologies. I think this is a best practice that would benefit many of our customers.

Full agreement here - you definitely want to foster a holistic perspective in IT. 

What's interesting is that there are many, many admins who work for companies that are not in the Fortune x00 and they will tell you they are covering every aspect of ITalready.  Amazingly talented people who get it from knife-edge OJT instead of cross-training.  Some of the most effective effective and creative architectures I've ever seen are constructed by brilliant SMB people.

That's why it is so critical to simplify IT technology - people moving from skill to skill need to be able to understand all technologies with sufficient depth to make good decisions.

It's highly likely that a major disruption to corporate computing operations is going to come from increasing energy requirements and the actions we need to take in order to minimize their impact on the services we provide.  It's not just that energy costs are rapidly rising, but the use of that expensive energy is rising along with it.

Large scale data center operators are already heavily engaged in these discussions as evidenced by an interview Searchdatacenter did with Jeff Lowenberg of  The Planet, a hosting company in Houston, TX.  Jeff talks about a number of interesting things, including how they caulk leaks in the floor to keep from losing cold air and how they maintain their diesel generators. The last part on maintaining diesel fuel probably has excellent tips that anybody depending on large generators for backup electricity needs to know.

There's going to be new concepts, vocabulary  and acronyms to learn, such as air mixing,  hot aisle, cold aisle, chiller, CRAC (computer-room air-conditioning system), close-coupled cooling,  PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness)  and  DCE (Data Center Efficiency).

The good news is that fairly simple things can be done to improve the situation, without having to take more extreme measures as relocating to Iceland.  Dell's Dr. Albert Esser, who wrote today on Inside IT, was also featured in a recent article on the Computing site, talking about how temperatures in data centers can be kept warmer than people commonly think.   This article in CIO magazine also has some fairly simple ideas for more efficient cooling.

One of the biggest hurdles we face is getting senior management engaged.  This recent survey by the Uptime Institute (you've read about them if you read the other links in this post) contains fascinating information about the awareness of power and cooling as an issue. Many readers will likely identify with their findings that two thirds of those polled said their companies do not C-level sponsorship for green policy or governance mandates.  FWIW, The Uptime Institute puts on seminars for high density cooling, as well as other energy topics.  This podcast of an interview with Robert Sullivan is an introduction to those seminars.  Not having been to one of their seminars, I don't want this post to be perceived as an endorsement of their seminars - but if readers have comments to make about them, I'm more happy to post them.

I have a feeling this is going to be a huge deal and there will be lots of confusion and many opportunities for people to help each other out.  What are you seeing?  Is this stuff on your radar yet?  Is it front and center in your company or are you going it alone?  

Since Dell introduced the PowerEdge M-Series blade server, we've received many questions regarding how we designed the product. Most of these requests revolve around how Dell chose the M-Series chassis and blade design, plus how we achieved the impressive power efficiency metrics published in the third party report from Principled Technologies.

Dell designed the M1000e blade chassis as a 10U enclosure housing 16 blades and 6 highly flexible switches. Each half-height blade is capable of having up to 4 high speed ports per blade to maximize throughput out to the switches. The switches themselves are designed to be upgradeable to provide a long lasting enclosure capable of hosting the high speed interconnects of today and tomorrow. You can see more details about the Energy Smart components integrated into the M1000e in the following whitepaper.

We crafted the M-Series chassis from the ground up to be the most power efficient blade enclosure in the world. This meant methodically designing each individual enclosure component to run as efficiently as possible. Find out more in the following vlog with Tom Garvens, a senior engineering manager on the M-Series team.

As many of you know, we've been developing the Latitude XT for some time. During that time, we've spent a lot of time talking to Tablet PC customers about what they like and don't like about existing products.

Customers told us that existing Tablet PCs are just too clumsy and clunky. We've worked to address this by creating one of the lightest and thinnest 12.1" convertible tablets on the market at about 1" thick and 3.6 pounds. I'm glad to see that some reviewers like Andrew Baxter at Tablet PC Review said it was the smallest power adapter he's seen on any notebook or Tablet PC.

It's clear that displays are important to many customers as well. Many customers use Tablet PCs in outdoor or brightly-lit environments, and many existing products didn't have adequate screen brightness.  That's why we designed an optional daylight viewing panel that is the brightest in its category-at 400 nits, it's almost 2X the competition.  Now, this option does add a little more thickness and a little more weight.  So, for mainstream users more concerned about size and weight, we still recommend the backlit LED panel at 220 nits.

Next, as tablet users are mobile all day, they told us that battery life was becoming increasingly important.  We answered this with a standard six-cell battery that offers about 4 ½ hours of continuous battery life and an optional battery slice that snaps snugly on the underside for up to 9 hours of "all day computing." Regarding the battery slice, I saw that Engadget raised concerns about the battery slice blocking the air intake. Here's the deal: with the battery slice attached, there is  a small gap (1mm or so) between the slice and the bottom of the tablet. This space leaves sufficient room for air to flow from the fan through the sides of the system, allowing the unit to cool. In our tests, the system remains within spec for heat both with and without the slice.

But perhaps the biggest frustration customers told us about with existing offerings was around the use of "resistive" touch technology. This technology needs the user to apply force to the screen in order for the system to recognize interaction, which contributes to poor accuracy and durability issues with the screen itself. Many customers using resistive tablets that support both pen and touch actually wind up turning this feature off because the palm rejection technology is so cumbersome. On this front, I think we're making our biggest impact. The Latitude XT is the first sub-four pound convertible with both pen and "capacitive" touch technology. Capacitive technology senses the touch of a finger with no pressure leading to better accuracy, response times, screen durability, and ultimately, a better user experience. As an example, as far as accuracy and speed, our third-party tests confirmed this against the Lenovo X61T.  Also, the digitizer is rated up to 10 times more durable than competitors resistive touch digitizer technology.

In this vlog, Rick Seger from N-Trig and Bob Sparks from our Engineering team walk you through the capacitive pen and touch capability of the Latitude XT and introduce you to the benefits of freestyle computing. 

With this product, we've really made an effort to address our customers' issues with other Tablet PC offerings. I hope you agree!

Lots of folks have been waiting for us to release more details on the Latitude XT Tablet PC. My first brief post about it has received more than 400 comments and has gone on to become the #1 most viewed post in Direct2Dell's history. It's made some traction in the blogosphere too—almost 2,000 posts reference the product by name before we announced it.

Update: 12/11—Glenn just published his post. It has the capacitive touch vlog I mention in the last sentence of this post. 

And speaking of the blogosphere, many of you who are interested problably already have seen the updates from Engadget here and here.

We will begin taking orders and shipping the product by the end of the year.

The convertible tablet weighs in at 3.57lbs., making it is one of the lightest tablet PCs available. Pricing starts at $2,499. Now for some other specs...

Processors:

• Intel Core 2 Solo ULV processor U2100 (1.06GHz) or

• Intel Core 2 Duo ULV processor U7600 (1.20GHz)

12.1" WXGA (1280 x 800) display:

• Optional LED-backlit display

• LCD Outdoor viewing display for increased brighness in outdoor use

Graphics: Integrated ATI Radeon X1250 UMA adapter

Memory:

• All configurations include 1GB of integrated 533MHz memory

• optional 2GB or 3GB configurations available

Power/Battery Options:

• 4-cell 28W/Hr Li-Ion primary or secondary
• 6-cell 42W/Hr Li-Ion primary or secondary
• 45W/Hr Li-Ion High Capacity Battery Slice
• 45W (small form factor), 65W, Combo Auto/Air (90W test only)
• 3-foot power cord standard, 6-foot optional

Hard Drive Options:

• 40GB 1.8" 4200RPM hard drive

• 80GB 1.8" 4200RPM hard drive

• 120GB 1.8" 5400RPM hard drive

• 32 or 64GB Solid State Disk (SSD) drives

Input Devices:

• Finger Touch - Capacitive Touch Screen
• Pen - EM Digitizer
  • Eraser functionality actuated via side switch
  • Optional tether
  • Interaction with display controlled by three different replaceable "tips" for user-selectable writing experiences
• Full-size keyboard / full Latitude localization
• Dual-pointing; rubber domes with leveling rods
• Scroll Wheel with enter and back functionality (on display / slate)

Operating Systems:

• Windows Vista Business (32-bit or 64-bit)

• Windows Vista Ultimate (32-bit)

• Windows XP Tablet Edition 2005

Connectivity Options:

• Dell Wireless 1390 (802.11g)
• Dell Wireless 1490 (802.11a/g)
• Dell Wireless 1505 (802.11a/g/ Draft n)
• Dell Wireless 360 Bluetooth Module
• Dell Verizon Wireless 5720 Mobile Broadband3 (EV-DO Rev A)
• Dell Wireless 5720 Sprint Mobile Broadband3 (EV-DO Rev A)
• Dell Wireless 5720 Telus Mobile Broadband3 (EV-DO)

Tomorrow, we'll follow up this post with another that discusses functionality of the tablet with a nearly 10-minute vlog discussing the Latitude XT's capactive pen and touch capability. It's live now—see here.