Well, we were looking to blow the last bit of cash we had for last year on some workstation upgrades. We talked it over and looked at the money available, and put together a spec for 8 Dual-core Dual Opteron systems, with 8G ram and RAID-Mirrored hard drives. We talked to Boxx Technologies and Game PC and got some quotes, and then sent the thing off to GSA to be bid on. Such is the government way (interesting how I almost misspelled that “suck”).

Well, a few weeks went by and we got the final bids. We got a response from HP for alot more than we wanted to pay, and a response from some noname company for half that. Needless to say, GSA was about to buy us 8 computers from some company we’ld never heard of, which probably meant nonexistant support. Luckily, we saw a press release from Dell talking about their new use of Intel’s dual-core Xeon chips. Needless to say, we were interested. We quickly threw together a quote with them, and got it to GSA but it was really too late for inclusion. So we wound up just retracting the whole thing & starting over, but specifying the Dell machines. That’s great for us, since we have so much Dell hardware anyway, and we know their support is premium.

But that got us to thinking, we were planning to buy some new viz clusters in the upcoming year. Maybe Dell could cut us a deal? We asked them for a quote for 50 of those workstations, and quickly turned some heads and got a “What in the world are you doing?” We explained it to them, and they volunteered to send two guys to the office to talk to us.

They showed up right after the long weekend, and spent the morning with us talking about their new Blade server technology. I didn’t realize Dell had gotten so high-tech, but they showed us a configuration of 60 Dual-Core Dual-Xeon systems (for an effective 240 processors) in a single rack, with each blade individually mirrored internally. Plus a massive 20TB drive array (in a separate rack) built from several 10k RPM SCSI drives, and RAID’ed. Plus, each of these racks comes with a Digital KVM capable of monitoring the entire boot process (BIOS included), and has a nice modular setup where fans & networking components can be hotswapped without removing blades. And from what it sounds like, we could get two or three of these racks for what we were thinking about before. Granted, these won’t have video cards, but we can add separate 3U graphics nodes for pennies compared to the price savings.

Plus, the guys at dell were kind enough to divulge a few more secrets. Apparently, Intel is working on quad-core processors, which Dell has in testing/evaluation systems now, and Intel has plans to get 128cores on a chip within the next few years. Also, Dell is really big on something called “Topspin”. I’m not sure, but I think their website is www.topspin.com. It seems to be some kind of Infiniband-based Networking structure, but it’s capable of handling more than just your typical ethernet-style data.

Definately some fun nuggets in that presentation, but more than anything I was just impressed by how much Dell has grown up in the last few years. I’m used to thinking of them as a Desktop solution provider, not a server solution provider. But it seems now they can get everything from the Large Data storage to the Dense Computing Power stuff.

I had planned on putting a Dell logo on this article, but they seem really anal about their logo linking nowhere but to their homepage, and they can revoke it, and alot of other crap.

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