Super Geeky Dell Servers At Tech-Ed 2009

It was a real Microsoftian nerd fest at the Los Angeles Convention Center yesterday as I beheld my one and only day at Tech-Ed 2009, Microsoft’s huge developer conference. Its too bad. It was only in Los Angeles this year. Next year it will be in New Orleans and I likely won’t be going. One of the coolest things about the entire show was that instead of a show floor full of sales drones, they had real nerds out there to talk about the gear, geek to geek, as it were. I had read a little about Dell’s new server technologies, so I sauntered over to the huge Dell booth to take a gander. 

Aside from the extremely wicked new server technologies the guy showed me (a Flash RAM module built in to the servers to allow failed BIOS update roll-backs and SD card and USB ports inside the 1U and 2U chassis) I found one slick ass technological leap without being dragged over to it; a fan. Yeah. Whoop, Tyler. I can hear you calling me a dork, but you’d be wrong. Dead wrong. What I was looking at was a physical demo of two server channel fans, one from some generic vendor and the other the new technology from Dell. 

They were set up on a board and had clear plexiglas housings shaped just like they would inside a server enclosure. They were both powered up and blowing, both at about the same flow rate. What was distinctive was the fact that the Dell fan was using only 1.1 watts while the other unit was nearing 20 watts. Wow! Now, there are fans out there which draw only 10 watts, but if you consider that you can use up to 10 Dell fan units and only just break the wattage being used by a single fan from the competition, then you start to get the idea. Now imagine if you were in charge of preparing the power usage map for a deployment of 100 servers!

Yeah. 

I’m glad Dell put new server bezels on their swank new servers and I’m glad that the LED display on the front can show an entire MAC address without having to scroll, but these niceties aren’t going to save a large company hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on their electric bill, either. It will be very interesting to see what HP comes out with in response.