Server

Since 1995, I’ve had the pleasure to participate in the growth of Dell from a relatively small computer start-up to one of the largest technology providers in the world. What a ride it’s been!

In 2001, I joined Dell's Industry Solutions Group (ISG), typically referred to as the OEM Group within Dell. It’s been ten years since our group began customizing hardware and providing unique services to OEM customers who use standard Dell hardware in their offerings. Last week, my colleague Bruce Eric Anderson, introduced me in a post he wrote on Google's new search appliance. Google is one of our many customers and represent some of the topics that I’ll be writing about here on Inside Enterprise IT.

As a Systems Consultant, I’ve assisted hundreds of product managers, engineers and developers create hardware appliances for their solution. I’ve helped them manage through hardware transitions, and, I’ve informed them about the future of Dell hardware solutions so they could be prepared for all the improvements that come with the advancements of technology.

This past March, Dell released the first of its 11^th generation of PowerEdge servers based on Intel’s XEON 5500 series of CPUs, the PowerEdge R610, R710 and T610. These truly innovative servers, along with the recently released PowerEdge R410 and T410, incorporate many improvements driven specifically by our OEM customers. I have seen several generations of PowerEdge servers marketed as appliances by our customers, and every generation has been consistently more reliable, stable, and feature-appropriate than its predecessor.

We continuously listen to the needs of our customers and use that information to improve the products and services that help them achieve their market goals more effectively and efficiently.

So, I'm happy to be able to share my industry observations with you here and hope that you'll let me know your thoughts and feedback. If you want to reach me directly with questions, you can ping me at franklin_flint at Dell (dot) com.

AMD is introducing its Six-Core AMD Opteron processors (code named Istanbul) ahead of schedule and Dell is pleased to offer it in our portfolio including the Dell PowerEdge 2970, R805 and R905 rack servers and the PowerEdge M605, M805, M905 blade servers. We are committed to bringing efficiency to enterprise computing by simplifying technology and lowering the cost of managing IT environments, and the AMD Istanbul processors in our servers help us do just that.

Armando Acosta also wrote about this on the AMD@Work blog.

I recently had an opportunity to catch up with Sally Stevens, vice president, Platform Marketing, Dell and Margaret Lewis, director, Server Product Marketing, AMD, about our collaboration and shared commitment to helping our customers do more with less.

Here is what Margaret Lewis told me about AMD’s collaboration with Dell: “Dell and AMD work together to develop innovative server technologies that can effectively handle today’s most demanding workloads like virtualization, database, and cloud computing. Our approach is to provide a power efficient architecture that balances CPU, memory and I/O for a platform that can easily scale to handle heavy use.

“The six-core AMD Opteron processor provides more compute capabilities with the addition of two more cores per processor, along with increased throughput with innovations like HT Assist. It also includes AMD-V, virtualization technology, and AMD-P, power management capabilities. Dell will be offering Six-Core AMD Opteron processors in 2P and 4P rack and blade servers.”

Incorporating the new six-core AMD Opteron processors in PowerEdge servers packs a lot of compute performance in same footprint as previous generations with:

• Raw Performance – adding two more cores gives this processor a lot more juice and we are seeing huge increases on SPECint benchmarks in our initial tests;
• Energy Efficiency – Istanbul operates at the same power draw as Shanghai, so that added performance means you get better performance/watt;
• Virtualization – with AMD-V technology coupled with our server design with massive memory capacity and I/O scalability, we are seeing whopping improvements in virtualization performance our initial benchmarks. We expect to continue to have industry-leading benchmarks for four-socket servers with Istanbul in the PowerEdge R905.

We are pleased to offer our customers this powerful new AMD technology. Congratulations AMD on the successful, and early, launch of the six-core AMD Opteron processors.

Here is a little more from my conversation with Sally and Margaret.

When we launched our 11^th Generation of PowerEdge Servers back in March we knew that we were unleashing a fantastic line-up carrying both beautiful design and unparalleled features and efficiency. 

I’m very excited to see that the UK media agree with us and are highlighting the PowerEdge R610 as a product that outclasses the competition in its space.

The PowerEdge R610 isn't recommended by just one media outlet -- it takes home "Recommended" ratings from three of the top IT publications in the UK -- PC Pro, IT Pro and Trusted Reviews.

I'd be interested in your thoughts.

Dell made news back in March when it launched five new PowerEdge servers with many different design and engineering features. Those servers were based on Intel's Xeon 5500 Series processors (codenamed Nehalem) and today, we've introducing two more. The first, the PowerEdge T410, is ideal for small businesses or remote office locations, and the second, the PowerEdge R410, is engineered specifically for technical computing environments like high performance computing.

My colleague, Dell-Matt M (note: we don't actually call him that -- he prefers Matt McGinnis), posted a thorough overview on the new servers over on Direct2Dell that includes a short video interview with Lisa Onstot on the new systems. Take a look.

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.