News

posted on 18 February 2008 11:40

---

Dell is expanding its cloud computing supplier infrastructure in Europe with an expanded Data Centre Solutions business unit.

The company says that "DCS is designed to address the unique needs of businesses operating hyper-scale computing environments that require datacentre optimised “design-to-order” technology and services. These data-intensive customers include Internet powerhouses, financial services organisations, national government agencies, institutional university and laboratory environments and upstream petroleum producers."

It cites a sale of lots of specially-built and configured servers top Internet search engine Ask.com as an example of what it can do.

Andy Cash, enterprise technology head for Dell EMEA talks of how Dell understands the special needs of cloud computing suppliers and aims to deliver products "that ensure datacentre optimisation, increased energy efficiency, and lower deployment and management costs," He reckons: "With an increased and dedicated presence in EMEA, we can extend these services and help businesses in this region adopt simplified "cloud computing" strategies of their own."

Dell reckons it can sell lots of industry standard servers at low cost and lower ownership costs to businesses embracing cloud computing infrastructures. The company says that as well as building to order it can design to order for these customers and so let them escape paying a so-called feature tax for aspects of general purpose servers that they don't need.

There is no word from Dell of an cloud-specific storage offerings or services. One imagines that Dell will be equally willing to design storage arrays to order for such customers, if the unit numbers are high enough.

In a way this is just another aspect of building special systems for customers. There is nothing really intrinsic to cloud computing in this offer, merely industry-standard products tailored a little better to customers needing large numbers of them. This plays into Dell's execution strengths but there is no cloud computing IT architecture or infrastructure uniqueness here.

Read more about the Ask example here.