Comments on: Dell racks up Microsoft as data center customer

After finding itself on the losing end of a number of deals, Dell creates a special unit aimed at getting its gear inside the world's largest data centers.

[Renegade Knight]

Imagine that. Dell listened to some of it's customers and both made them happy and made money. Now if they would just apply that to the rest of their operations.

[mewen]

Both HP and IBM have been doing this for years...where are/were the articles for them? Perhaps it's because Dell has just discovered that price isn't everything.

[Mr. Dee]

I have one of those trailer containers in my church yard which we use for storage and those things get really toasty. I hope they are packed with air conditioners because they are gonna need it. Its a unique approach I believe and adds some level of dynamics to Microsoft's initiative. We are accustomed to the traditional building with the huge Server room, I think in this global economy and the fundamental shift in growth has really forced Company's I believe in thinking 'outside the box' about how they invest in their IT infrastructure.

[zvonr]

want to put your servers in a container today get one from Sun:
http://www.sun.com/products/sunmd/s20/

[The_happy_switcher]

These sorry ass companies deserve each other. In my book this is a 'lose-lose' situation.

[Vegaman_Dan]

The OEM's are starting to shift their server designs away from redundancy in components in hardware to redundacy by having multiple identical systems mirrored. From a design and support view, this is a better solution as the costs are much lower by avoiding the need for redundant memory banks, power supplies, etc. These days when a failure occurs, it's far more often to be a hard drive or a system board. One you can plan for with extra drives, but a system board failure takes out the entire system regardless how many redundant parts you have in there.

While at one time you could have a nice 2-4U rack server offering that redundacy in one package, it's now more economical to run four 1U servers in the same space offering higher group performance and higher uptimes. It's a tradeoff and money is a big factor.