A briefing this week from Dell, which has started down the path pioneered by IBM, in retreating further away from hardware sales and tentatively towards various methods of consulting for businesses.

The company wanted you to hear about its pre-virtualisation check, done entirely remotely. It wanted to pass on the news about its new smaller business servers – T400 and T710 – which are decently configured for VMware and Hyper-V, and made a point of mentioning its next-generation remote management card, which will update drivers and patches for you as they are announced.

I’m writing this at some speed, just after the end of its embargo period, though to be perfectly honest I couldn’t see any Big Secrets being let out of the bag. When I asked the questions that PC Pro is getting a bit of a reputation for, about how Dell’s remote access services would be legally defined to protect the client’s data and help to disclose exactly where the team of consultants furtling round your servers, are based… then I got a few simple, honest ‘don’t knows’.

But the gaps in the consulting delivery fell rather by the wayside when they started casually mentioning that these new servers are eleventh generation. For Spinal Tap fans, this is a magic number: we are dealing with Eleventh Generation servers. Just the kind of throwaway number guaranteed to impress in the boardroom!

I actually think Dell has had a bit of a wake-up moment – a rueful off-guard comment was made to the effect that [as a hardware vendor] “we have given up trying to persuade our customers not to virtualise their servers”, and the two new servers fill a gap in the market I’ve been watching develop for the past two quarters, wherein all the little cheap servers have vanished and the multicore monsters have come in at £10,000-£20,000… so perhaps the Eleventh Generation isn’t as much of a cheap shot as I had thought.