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Dell shows off its heavy-metal server range

Posted on 22 Oct 2010 at 17:31

Resident head-banger Steve Cassidy visits London's O2 arena for some seriously heavy metal, but not of the music variety

The worst thing about going to these company events is when one runs into the “it’s all good” types, usually followed shortly afterwards by a gaggle of “stick to the script” types.

That’s what makes TechCamp so useful, because throughout this show – both the front-of-house parts and those parts concerning pieces of kit that we can’t talk about – Dell showed a pretty clear understanding that there’s a whole new category of problems emerging in the server business.

Dell showed a pretty clear understanding that there’s a whole new category of problems emerging in the server business

Everyone has been scrabbling along for the past few years on very little money, and virtualisation has enabled this to occur – there’s still a lot of action in the job marketplace for people with virtualisation skills, because at the very largest enterprise scales virtualisation work is a lot easier than it is in smaller businesses.

This leads to an ever-widening gulf between the mega-companies and what they can afford, and the smaller firms. Dell’s fear is that the little guys are going to fall victim to an outside context problem, a sensation best described in a short snippet from Iain M Bank’s Excession.

It’s difficult for Dell or the rest of the industry to persuade those primitive tribes who are still operating 2005 (or earlier) server hardware in the wake of the worst recession for a hundred years, to venture out of the jungle and take a look at their new, shiny steamboats.

Hard times

Now I don’t mean to insult anyone here, or cause them to go into a huff defending their purchasing policies. If you’ve been keeping out of the new server market for the past few years, I’m not saying that makes you in any way unusual, nor that you’ve been in dereliction of your duty to bang on the boardroom table and fight your corner come budgeting season. Times have been hard.

It’s odd, though, that while purchasing has gone quiet, client companies have been going to the wall in droves and futures have looked so uncertain, things have, if anything, become easier for the guys in the R&D department.

Freed from being shackled to quarterly results and pointless leapfrogging arms-races with their closest competitors, they’ve been able to sneak off and concentrate on the real technical challenges facing their sector, and what they’re now bringing forth, as exemplified by Dell’s three tons of heavy-metal kit on the stage at TechCamp, represents a significant leap forward.

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