Green, efficient, and incredibly powerful: Dell and eBay Inc.


Today, the Dell Data Center Solutions team is at eBay Inc.’s Salt Lake City-area data center to celebrate the launch of our newest Modular Data Center (MDC). We will be contributing to the event through presentations, interviews and Dell MDC tours for partners, industry leaders and local officials. It’s a celebration of what is possible when a customer looks to Dell for help in creating innovative solutions to core business challenges.

The theme of the event is “A Cleaner, Greener Future,” which eBay Inc. truly does accomplish using Bloom Energy fuel cells as their primary power source and hyper-efficient Dell MDCs as one of the ways they deploy their infrastructure and IT solutions. How has Dell followed up with an even better MDC offering compared to the award-winning 20-rack MDC solutions we deployed at eBay’s Phoenix site? By leveraging the same 100% free-air cooling technology and combining it with a jaw-dropping 50 Kilowatt-per-rack redundant power capability, wrapped in a new 24-rack, 1 Megawatt total capacity MDC solution to make it the densest MDC available.

Sure the big numbers are exciting, but it’s what eBay Inc. is able to accomplish with this technology that matters. Dell was asked to figure out how to extend the useful life of our MDC by making IT refreshes easier. We responded by designing a custom rack that can be hot-swapped and easily wheeled in and out without interrupting operations.  

This brief post can’t do justice to the literally hundreds of small but critical design decisions that DCS and eBay Inc. engineers made together as they optimized for eBay Inc.’s needs and goals. Such a close relationship is developed by having dedicated resources and even a dedicated onsite development lab – the recently launched “Evergreen” Joint Innovation lab – where we’ve begun developing the future of hyperscale data center solutions..

How do we know all of this is making a difference for eBay Inc.? Because they have a metric for their business, called DSE (for Digital Services Efficiency), that helps partners like Dell evaluate our innovations against what matters most to eBay Inc. MDC and IT solutions that support high power as well as great efficiency (PUE as low as 1.03) improve their DSE scores wherever they’re deployed.

We celebrate being part of something great today, and look forward to continuing to deliver ground-breaking solutions through the ongoing relationships developed between Dell and eBay Inc. Together we can drive greener, more efficient, and incredibly powerful data center solutions.

Drew Schulke

About the Author: Drew Schulke

Drew Schulke is Vice President in Dell's Infrastructure Solution Group where he is responsible for product management of Dell's Primary Storage Portfolio (PowerMax, PowerStore, PowerFlex, PowerVault, Unity, VxBlock & VPLEX). Drew joined Dell in 1999, with previous roles in product development, operations, enterprise services, and seven years in Dell’s Data Center Solutions group where he was responsible for product management and product marketing for hyper-scale customers, and four years in Dell's Networking Business Unit, where he was responsible engineering and product management. Prior to joining Dell, Drew was a Senior Consultant in Accenture’s SAP practice focused on customers in the manufacturing segment. Drew holds a master’s degree from the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University and a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the University of Arizona.