Steve Cumings, executive director of data center solutions at Dell
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Steve Cumings, executive director of data center solutions at Dell, delivered a Monday afternoon session on new strategies for finding business value in the cloud, suggesting that hosts can find new value in their business and new revenue by looking at new technologies of which they might not yet be aware.
He started with some research data bout the volume of people (3 billion) connecting to the internet in the immediate future, and the demands for storage and other hardware that is going to create.
In general, he discussed the concept of moving from the “typical” to “what’s possible.”
In specific, he discussed several notions. One was moving from traditional rack-mount servers to microservers, a design concept intended to put a dozen or so servers on every 3U rack within a cabinet, enabling many multiple times more servers per cabinet, and adding power and space efficiency. Another was the notion of the modular data center, which enables you to deploy power and cooling along with workload and optimize power efficiency, while greatly speeding the time to deploy an operational data center.
A customer he used to illustrate the power, capacity and deployment-time requirements that dell’s evolving technology can deliver in practice, was Bing Maps. He showed a pretty impressive time-lapse video of a data center deployment, in which the group took an empty field to an operational data center in four months.
In discussing microservers, he said they aren’t designed for every workload. But he showed some examples of workloads for which they were designed. These optimized devices have a lot of the features stripped away to focus on fitting the most gear into the smallest space.
They deliver four times the density, and something like a 75 percent reduction in cooling costs.
In a specific customer’s example, a hosting provider switched to using microservers, and apparently is able to generate $1.6 million per year more per rack.
He also discussed movement into the virtualized and cloud hosting space. Dell is also working on new architectures and ways of doing things around those.
Cumings discussed DreamHost, who used Dell’s Crowbar technology to quickly deploy a cloud environment.
His point, he says, is generally that there are lots of opportunities for new revenue in the hosting space that can be found around innovation at the architecture level.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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