Dell Data Center Solutions: A Strong Alternative to DIY in Hyperscale Pioneer in Scale-Out Servers for Large Datacenters Provides Value- Added Services to Reduce Total Cost of Ownership Executive Summary Over the last decade, large search engine, social media, and cloud providers have built giant datacenter capacity to power their internet services, and they have found themselves needing a new type of server to support their massive scale. For these organizations, their IT infrastructure is the cost of goods sold for the services they provide. They depend on the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) for their datacenter infrastructures to maximize profits. Dell developed Data Center Solutions (DCS) in 2006 specifically to address the complex needs of these hyperscale datacenter customers. Dell claims that DCS’s workload-tailored approach results in significant TCO advantages compared to “one size fits all” solutions like HP’s Project Moonshot, and it can provide the same benefits and innovation as an ODM Do It Yourself (DIY) model with added supply chain continuity and global deployment benefits. DCS addresses the needs of the largest cloud datacenters in the world. For more mainstream customers, Dell takes leading-edge innovations from DCS and evolves them into “hyperscale-inspired” solutions in their Dell PowerEdge C and PowerEdge product lines for standard private cloud deployments and web hosting environments. Dell’s supply chain expertise underpins Supply-Chain-as-a-Service (SCaaS) capabilities such as aggregate purchasing power, agile bid responses, and resilient global reach for datacenter customers. Dell DCS’s multi-ODM sourcing model provides cost advantages as well as high quality designs. Dell Financial Services and Dell’s Rack Integration Services contribute to a comprehensive “sales-to-operations” offering. Moor Insights & Strategy believes Dell will benefit from and should continue to leverage this cross-product line cultivation and rapidly translate their DCS feature simplicity model into their PowerEdge cost and pricing structure. Dell should also stay on top of emerging cloud software frameworks like OpenStack to help focus DCS and PowerEdge customer requirements. The PowerEdge organization also must consider how they will address and compete with emerging regional and vendor-driven rack requirements like the Open Compute Project and Project Scorpio. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Page 1 Dell Data Center Solutions a Strong Alternative to DIY in Hyperscale 12/11/2013 Copyright © 2013 Moor Insights & Strategy Scale and Hyperscale Large cloud datacenters are undergoing rapid growth due to consumer adoption of mobile computing and emerging Internet of Things (IoT) devices and infrastructure. These organizations need innovative ways to handle the flood of new demands from these new usage models. They rely on hyperscale computing to do so. Hyperscale computing is the infrastructure and provisioning required to deploy internet-based services and utility computing from thousands of traditionally-networked server chassis to millions of server and distributed storage nodes connected by a new generation of network fabrics. Hyperscale datacenters have the following emergent attributes: For each service, the OS, development tools, and much of their applications stack are based on open source code. Open source allows frequent, incremental increases in performance and efficiency which become a competitive advantage when operating at scale. System hardware and silicon vendors react to changes in software frameworks and work with the larger services directly to understand their requirements and create differentiated feature sets. Services buy new hardware then write and deploy new infrastructure code and workloads based on those new hardware features. They characterize the performance of new features and provide immediate feedback to their vendors. This is an open-ended feedback loop—a “virtuous cycle”. Infrastructure vendors work directly with their customers. Customers have total control over their software ecosystems and can deploy new code quickly to take advantage of new hardware. The impact of hyperscale computing results in the emergence of hardware architectures that are tuned for specific services and workloads. Enterprise datacenters are noticing the savings and efficiencies achieved in hyperscale environments and want to take advantage of these benefits themselves. However, they do not have the scale to warrant the development of custom architectures that are tuned to their specific workloads. These customers are looking at moving to hosted or on- premise cloud computing to realize the infrastructure and operational advantages of hyperscale on a smaller scale. Several industry initiatives have been developed for customers seeking to build efficient cloud computing infrastructures: Open source cloud computing software frameworks, like OpenStack and CloudStack, have been developed for use in public and private clouds of all sizes. These modular architectures focus on providing the compute, network, and storage component resources for creating, managing, and deploying infrastructure cloud services using common standards. Rack-level hardware “standards” developed by organizations like the Open Compute Project (OCP) and Project Scorpio in China are designed to provide common efficient server design solutions for scalable computing. However, many of the design concepts are specific to certain hyperscale datacenter environments (Facebook, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) and do not necessarily translate well to standard private cloud deployments. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Page 2 Dell Data Center Solutions a Strong Alternative to DIY in Hyperscale 12/11/2013 Copyright © 2013 Moor Insights & Strategy Dell Data Center Solutions (DCS) and PowerEdge C Dell recognized early on the emerging trend of hyperscale computing based on feedback from the largest datacenters in world. In 2006, Dell Data Center Solutions (DCS) was created with the sole purpose of tackling the complex needs of these customers. Since its inception, Dell DCS has powered the majority of the world’s largest search engines, social media sites, clouds, and most visited websites. Dell shipped their first DCS server in May 2007 and achieved the milestone of shipping their millionth server just five years later in 2012. The DCS business model is drastically different from Dell’s traditional enterprise IT server model in terms of the customers served and the design approach used. An illustration of these differences, as explained by Dell, is shown in Figure 1. Figure 1: DCS in the Dell Server Solutions Portfolio DCS provides workload-tailored solutions including collaborative design/development, dedicated engineering, asset tracking and reporting, and onsite services. Dell’s customer focus includes the world’s largest search engines and cloud computing providers. DCS leverages Dell’s volume supply chain to deliver—quickly and at scale— the latest, most efficient, and cost-effective datacenter technology. DCS architectural teams assess each customer’s requirements and datacenter environment. They develop server and storage designs from a rack perspective to increase density and energy efficiency and to reduce deployment complexity. DCS engineers also work to optimize workload-specific performance at the server node level, using Dell’s application optimization, power, and thermal expertise. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Page 3 Dell Data Center Solutions a Strong Alternative to DIY in Hyperscale 12/11/2013 Copyright © 2013 Moor Insights & Strategy Dell’s engineering teams have developed technologies that directly address many of the key pain points for customers including power, thermals, and physical space optimization. Dedicated experts in the fields of datacenter architectures, thermal design, and power efficiency are engaged for each new design. Using Dell’s best practices, optimized hardware designed by DCS meets high standards of quality and reliability. DCS prides itself on the innovation and TCO savings they have provided to their customers over the last seven years. Some key areas of innovation include: Power Optimization: DCS was a pioneer in creating optimized rack infrastructures that balance performance and efficiency. With a deep understanding of their customers’ system implications, DCS engineering teams strive to eliminate all unnecessary power consumption in the rack. DCS’s optimization innovations include collaboration with industry partners (such as suppliers of voltage regulators and uninterruptable power supplies) on tailored solutions that meet the specific needs of their customers. Efficient Datacenter Cooling Solutions: DCS leverages best practices in design and application of HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) in the datacenter to achieve greater efficiency. DCS’s thermal engineering teams understand datacenter air flow and recirculation, and they provide a detailed evaluation of each customer’s environment. One example of this approach to solving specific needs was removing the fans from server chassis in a rack and embedding larger fans in Dell’s modular datacenter (MDC) facilities. Modularization: DCS has been a thought leader in using shared infrastructure in their server designs. DCS created some of the first designs that shared infrastructure within a