I was talking to a friend and he said whenever they talked to Dell they couldn’t find out much information about who Dell DCS’s customers were. There are approximately 30 clients of DCS. Part of their criteria is customers purchasing over 2,000 servers with the following characteristics.
So, I spent a few hours researching who Dell DCS customers. I came up with about 20 DCS customers. I am not going to share the complete list on this blog, but I am sharing the list with a few others who can help me figure out who the others are.
Let me tell you how I found two of the DCS customers – Lawrence Berkeley National Labs & Saudi Aramco.
LBNL was easy as they have a bunch of Dell DCS Xanadu systems in Top 500 Supercomputer list.
I blogged about Xanadu first generation. Here is generation II.
Dell has launched new XS-23 II high-end x86 servers, codenamed Xanadu II in celebration of the IInd birthday of Data Center Solutions (DCS), a division producing servers aimed at easy customizability for cloud computing and other data center applications.
The XS-23 come with a choice of several different processors, including Intel Nehalem chip, although those machines will be offered in blade configurations with a built-in fabric architecture. It will be provided as four two-socket servers in a 2U standard rack mount footprint, accommodating up to 24 disk drives. According to Norrod, customers can configure up to 88 of Dell's new servers with 704 processing cores and 396 TB of storage, plus switching, in a single rack, for 25% higher density in comparison to similarly outfitted blade servers on a per-U basis.
When I was going through Dell DCS documents on their web site I found a reference to an Oil & Gas customer.
The Data Center Solutions (DCS) team have an Oil & Gas customer that is always looking to push the envelope when it comes to getting the most out of GPGPU’s in order to deliver seismic mapping results faster.
On the Supercomputing 500 site going through Dell Hardware, I found Saudi Aramco with a bunch of HP and Dell Hardware. 5 systems all with 512 servers, dual processor, 4-6 core processors.
The other 18 on the list are interesting to study. It’s not that hard to find the Dell DCS customers