We’ve had great success with BladeSystem. Yet I know, and especially with our larger enterprise customers, that they don’t want just one BladeSystem enclosure, they are thinking they need a whole datacenter full of them. They don’t have problems with powering and cooling one enclosure, they have datacenter power and cooling challenges. The big challenges come from big scale. We really try to focus ourselves on this reality a lot. In fact, we tell each other “It’s about the datacenter, dummy!” to remind ourselves that we need to solve problems not just for a 17 inch box, but for a 17,000 square foot datacenter. This means taking the concepts that made BladeSystem so successful and applying the same design principles to datacenter scale.
Today we are introducing the Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager. Virtual Connect simplifies the connection of an enclosure of servers to LANs and SANs, and even allows the dynamic reconfiguration of server connections to LANs and SANs within an enclosure (We've timed operators making changes to their server connections in under 2 minutes). Virtual Connect has already been a huge hit for us, and now we are taking it datacenter wide with the ability to move server connections across the whole datacenter – up to 1600 servers.
BladeSystem Thermal Logic technologies are about power efficiency. Energy efficiency for sure, but also the ability to plug in just the right amount of power and cooling when you need it. We are extending these ideas into the datacenter with our new power distribution rack and modular UPS. They are both really power efficient (99% for the PDR and 97% for the UPS, compared to 91%-94% for a traditional UPS) and they allow for the installation of power distribution at the time that the IT load is added, rather than having to guess up front (sometimes years in advance) exactly how much power will be needed, what size circuits will be used and how long the cables need to be.
Expect to see more from us as we work to make the datacenter a friendlier place. Friendlier to the power company, friendlier to the system admins, and friendlier to the CFO. Today’s products represent a big first step. |
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