Over the last decade, large search engine, social media, and cloud providers have built giant datacenter capacity to power their internet services, and they have found themselves needing a new type of server to support their massive scale. For these organizations, their IT infrastructure is the cost of goods sold for the services they provide. They depend on the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) for their datacenter infrastructures to maximize profits. Dell developed Data Center Solutions (DCS) in 2006 specifically to address the complex needs of these hyperscale datacenter customers. Dell claims that DCS’s workload-tailored approach results in significant TCO advantages compared to “one size fits all” solutions like HP’s Project Moonshot, and it can provide the same benefits and innovation as an ODM Do It Yourself (DIY) model with added supply chain continuity and global deployment benefits. DCS addresses the needs of the largest cloud datacenters in the world. For more mainstream customers, Dell takes leading-edge innovations from DCS and evolves them into “hyperscale-inspired” solutions in their Dell PowerEdge C and PowerEdge product lines for standard private cloud deployments and web hosting environments. Dell’s supply chain expertise underpins Supply-Chain-as-a-Service (SCaaS) capabilities such as aggregate purchasing power, agile bid responses, and resilient global reach for datacenter customers. Dell DCS’s multi-ODM sourcing model provides cost advantages as well as high quality designs. Dell Financial Services and Dell’s Rack Integration Services contribute to a comprehensive “sales-to-operations” offering. Moor Insights & Strategy believes Dell will benefit from and should continue to leverage this cross-product line cultivation and rapidly translate their DCS feature simplicity model into their PowerEdge cost and pricing structure. Dell should also stay on top of emerging cloud software frameworks like OpenStack to help focus DCS and PowerEdge customer requirements. The PowerEdge organization also must consider how they will address and compete with emerging regional and vendor-driven rack requirements like the Open Compute Project and Project Scorpio.

Table of Contents

• Executive Summary
• Scale and Hyperscale
• Dell Data Center Solutions (DCS) and PowerEdge C
• Commercializing “Open”
• Call to Action
• Important Information About This Paper
• Figure 1: DCS in the Dell Server Solutions Portfolio
• Figure 2: Dell’s Global Services and Supply Chain Support
• Table 1: Dell DCS Hyperscale Customer Wins Since 2006
• Figure 3: Dell DCS Innovation Transfer Example

Companies Referenced:

• Alibaba
• ARM
• Baidu
• Dell
• eBay
• Facebook
• HP
• Microsoft
• Tencent