Dell Announce High-End Storage and Compute for Sub-Hyper-Scale

Dell has announced a series of new products in the newly formed Datacenter Scalable Solution line of business at Dell’s annual tech fest, DellWorld, held in home town Austin, Texas.

For starters, there is a new line of DSS-branded servers aimed at the sub-hyperscale market; telecommunications providers, managed service providers, web-tech, and oil-and-gas companies. These organisations need pluggable options without all the bells and whistles of traditional enterprise blade servers, as they handle much of those details themselves. Instead, they need reliable, modular systems that can be deployed at scale, though not quite the scale of the very large so-called hyper-scalers.

Dell have also announced the DSS 7000 storage server, based on the DCS XA90 announced last year, which can deliver up to 720 terabytes of storage in one 4U chassis. Dell have squeezed up to 90 hot-serviceable 3.5-inch drives into the unit, coupled with a pair of 2-socket server nodes.

Dell have also announced 1U and 2U server options in the DSS 1500, DSS 1510 and DSS 2500, once again purpose built to match the needs of this market segment.

While people focus a lot on cloud at the hyper-scale level, they tend to overlook this large segment that build cloud-like services without assembling their own servers and storage. They need something pre-designed from a provider like Dell, and Dell is now specifically targeting this segment with server and storage options built based on their requirements.

It’ll be interesting to see how sales of these new products go.

This article first appeared in Forbes.com here.