The Power (and Cooling) to do More

I’m sure many of you have seen Dell’s recent ads showing our ability to deliver “The power to do more.”  I have recently been involved in a couple of customer surveys around energy efficiency, both in the US and the UK, and the results and feedback tell me that our advertising slogan is completely relevant for my area of focus – power and cooling.

With each new generation of servers, Dell is in a constant race to meet expectations for lightning-fast performance, consistent availability, and to equip customers to deploy the newest applications and technologies. As you might expect, each generation is much more powerful, which in turn requires more energy to operate. One might expect to see a huge, incremental jump in energy consumption that corresponds to the huge jumps in performance.

Interestingly enough, the opposite is true. In fact, generation over generation, the performance per watt of Dell servers is increasing dramatically. Over the course of a decade, Dell saw a 56x performance per watt improvement. In just five years, the improvement is 31x. I’m excited to see the level of efficiency we are able to deliver in our next generation of servers and how that impacts our graph. 

The fact is, Dell works tirelessly to solve your power and cooling needs. We do this through innovative design approaches, constant focus on maximizing efficiency throughout our product portfolio, ongoing lab research and testing, and partnerships with some of the world’s leading organizations.

In our power and cooling point-of-view document, we outline the way we look at this crucial area. It is more than just a set of individual components or IT products to us. We look at it as an entire ecosystem that needs to be running to maximum efficiency throughout the chain. As a starting point, we have identified several key areas to focus your energy on as you begin the journey toward the ideal data center strategy:

  • Measure, monitor, and manage
  • Right-sizing your data center
  • Scaling capacity on demand
  • World-class energy efficiency

Check out the whitepaper here to dig deeper into each of these important areas.

Having a solution-oriented and customer-based approach allows us to help you work through your power and cooling challenges. Improving current products, generation after generation, and introducing innovative products and solutions to fill gaps in the market, Dell aspires to lower the PUE of every customer, thereby saving you OpEx and CapEx and freeing up resources to do more with what you already have.

Our recent surveys show that the industry wants to hear more from Dell primarily in the areas of data center efficiency, world-class efficient blade servers, industry-leading energy efficient rack servers, data center assessments, and power infrastructure. What would you like to see more of from Dell in the way of whitepapers, videos and other materials?

Many customers say that energy efficiency is a priority for them, but that it is really one of many that must be juggled, with a slight smaller percentage indicating that it is one of their top three priorities. Where does energy efficiency rank in your organization?  

About the Author: Milly Pellizzari