Things are heating up (and cooling down) in Round Rock

Summer may be vacation season but the Dell team is in full swing. Throughout the month of June, we hosted and participated in several events and announced innovative new products and updates.

Innovation Days

Last month the combined Austin and Round Rock campuses played host to Dell Enterprise Innovation Days, which gave media, bloggers and analysts a chance to meet with Dell executives, engineers and customers. Attendees visited the Thermal and Futuresville labs, the Design Lab, the Dell customer Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and the Dell Global Support & Deployment (GSD) Command Center in and around Austin. Read more on the TACC visit in John Obeto’s blog here. Attendees also participated in a CTO panel on new ways to innovate, a discussion on the pending Dell-EMC combination and got a preview of Dell’s 2016 Annual Report to Customers.

Innovation Day guests learned about ‘Triton,’ a liquid cooling solution for hyperscale. The system is the result of a unique collaboration with eBay, which needed a custom-built revolutionary data center cooling system. Triton can run faster and more efficiently than traditional air-cooled systems thanks to water’s ability to transport heat 25 times more efficiently that air. Dell is the first major vendor to safely bring facility water directly into each server sled to cool the CPU, resulting in unmatched cooling efficiencies and the lowest water consumption of any liquid cooled solution on the market today. Additionally, it uses 97% less datacenter cooling power than the average air-cooled data center, resulting in major cost savings and performance increases.

PowerEdge and HPC Boost Customer Speed

In June we made some key updates to our PowerEdge Server portfolio, further enabling customers to take advantage of our two-socket lineup of PowerEdge 13th generation servers.  The new additions include the PowerEdge R530, and R430 rack servers and the T430 tower server. The new R530 features up to 80% more cores compared to the previous-generation and is designed for a wide range of common business applications and small-scale virtualization. The R430 has up to 15% more processing cores compared to its previous-generation and the T430 is ideal for a wide range of collaboration and productivity applications.

Additionally, Dell worked with the Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC), part of South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research to release the fastest computer on the continent. The computer, CHPC’s Dell-powered “Lengau” System, will drive new research and help provide the computational power to build the private sector and non-academic user base of the CHPC. Lenagu will provide access to resources for users who had limited or no access to the resources in the past.

Dell Attends Partner Events

Members from the Dell Storage team attended Nutanix’s .NEXT conference in Las Vegas, where they met with customers and partners. Alan Atkinson spoke on how new storage, server and software architectures are shrinking the datacenter. He also announced the extension of Dell’s two-year partnership with Nutanix in the hyper-converged space.

At the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC), we had the opportunity to meet with customers to discuss Dell HPC innovations, including the availability of new Dell HPC systems, early access to innovative HPC technologies, technology partner collaborations, and successful global customer implementations. We were also able to highlight Dell customer collaborations between CHPC, TACC, Tapad, Sensus and others.

We rounded out the month with Red Hat Summit, where Dell was proud to serve as a platinum sponsor. At the event, we announced new OpenStack extensions to help focus our technology efforts on building a hybrid cloud solution for customers. Most significantly, our Red Hat Cloud Solution has integrated its latest generation of PowerEdge server platforms with powerful new Intel Xeon E5-2600 V4 processors.  The event also showcased our OpenStack Cloud and Software-defined Storage solutions with Red Hat Ceph. These new SDS architectures help optimize Ceph storage for IOPS performance and scalability.

While we may still be in the heat of summer, Dell World (October 18-20 in Austin) is fast approaching. Register up until July 15 to take advantage of our discounted early bird registration. We hope to see you there!

Sarah Vela

About the Author: Sarah Vela

Sarah Vela is no longer with Dell Technologies.