QuakeCon, known as the “Woodstock of Gaming,” takes place every year in Dallas, Texas. This year from August 1-4, at the Hotel Anatole, thousands of gamers from all over the world will be in attendance. Since 2009, Dell has supported this event from the tablets at check-in to the PCs in the tournament area to the servers and networking infrastructure behind the scenes. This intense and exciting gaming convention is free and open to the public and a great opportunity for gamers to collaborate with each other and with QuakeCon’s partners.
As one of the pioneers of PC Gaming, Alienware is a huge part of this event. This year QuakeCon will feature 110 Alienware X51 desktops, Alienware and Dell monitors, and TactX mice and keyboards in its competition area. QuakeCon chooses to use award-winning Alienware hardware in their competition area because of its innovative engineering, aggressive design, and the most advanced components in the industry. Even registration is running on Latitude tablets and Dell laptops.
Just as importantly, behind the curtain Dell is playing huge role as well. Nine Dell PowerEdge 12th generation servers are running the backbone infrastructure and routing loads of all the traffic – 4,000 plus connections and continuous load balancing on the system. On top of that, the Dell servers will be used to power the tournament network and handle all of the loads associated with hosting the QLive games, game play needs and casters shadowing.
QuakeCon uses some of these Dell servers to run a small VMware cloud to do the load balancing across multiple servers. This allows them to handle any type of failure during the conference. Reliable failovers are especially important for an event with thousands of attendees at their keyboards all at once, and all day long.
Alienware has its own area in the BYOC section where attendees will be able to check out the newest lineup of laptops, compete for prizes, purchase accessories and swag, and sign up for an AlienwareArena.com account for a chance to win a new Alienware 14 laptop. If you bring your own Alienware to the BYOC, we will give you something unique as a thank you for being a customer. Here’s a video from last year just to give you a taste of what the infrastructure manager called “controlled chaos.”
Hope to see you there!
Frank Azor, an Alienware co-founder, now oversees XPS, Dell’s premium consumer brand and Dell gaming, which includes Alienware and Inspiron Gaming. Celebrating 20 years as the leader in PC gaming systems, Alienware sets the standard for premium gaming PCs and innovation, and Inspiron Gaming provides high performance gaming systems at an affordable cost that give gamers a competitive advantage at every level of play. Under his leadership, Dell’s XPS brand has risen to the top in innovation, design and performance, while becoming the most-award winning product-line in Dell history.
Frank joined Alienware as a quality engineer and later held executive roles in sales and marketing before creating the Alienware Product Group organization in 2003-after helping to pioneer the industry’s first high-performance gaming notebook, the Area-51M. Later that year, he was credited with the successful launch of Alienware’s first self-designed desktop case (Predator) which immediately made industry headlines and has defined the look of Alienware’s products ever since. Prior to Dell’s acquisition of Alienware in 2006, Frank held the positions of Senior Vice-President of Product Group and Marketing and Executive Vice-President managing the global executive leadership team and reporting directly to the President and CEO. Shortly after helping lead Alienware’s successful integration into Dell, Frank assumed the role of worldwide general manager for the Alienware business unit. Under Frank’s leadership, Alienware’s brand has become the worldwide leader in its industry and has earned hundreds of awards for its products including multiple best of CES product awards. As of 2017, Frank holds 16 patents granted under his name and has been named a milestone inventor by Dell.
In 2014, Frank’s role was expanded to include global responsibility for Dell’s XPS business unit, one of the company’s most innovative and valued brands. Since assuming responsibility for the XPS business unit for Dell, Frank instituted a new product and business strategy that led to the successful introduction of the highly acclaimed XPS 13 notebook which has won more than 300 awards since its introduction at CES 2015 and has been deemed the best notebook on the market from numerous outlets including Forbes, Wall Street Journal and CNET. On top of the product accomplishments, Frank’s leadership has reinstated rapid growth for Dell’s XPS business.
In 2017, Frank assumed responsibility for launching and managing Dell’s Inspiron Gaming line of powerful yet budget friendly gaming PCs. Inspiron Gaming systems have quickly become a favorite among players and reviewers desiring top graphics performance under $1000 USD. The systems have received many awards including a Computex d&i Gold winner and several Best Gaming PCs of CES awards.
Frank sits on the advisory board for Miami Dade College’s MAGIC program where he has led the creation of a Dell-backed scholarship fund to help both high school and college students learn skills and earn degrees in computer graphics design, animation and game development. Frank has also served as a volunteer judge for the FIRST robotics south Florida regional competition since 2013 (www.usfirst.org) an organization founded by Dean Kamen that has provided students with more than $50 million in college scholarships in 2017 alone.
Frank lives in Palmetto Bay, FL USA near Alienware’s headquarters with his wife, their 2 sons and their pet dachshund. Frank is currently playing Overwatch with his oldest son who is also an avid Minecraft player. Frank’s most anticipated games for 2017 exist in Virtual Reality where Frank has been immersed for years – and of course – powered by award-winning VR-ready PCs from Alienware and XPS.