Dell to make hardware for cloud

TINMAN Michael Dell, faced with decreasing PC sales, has decided to make servers for this new cloud thing that everyone is talking about.

Dell's idea appears to be to knock out custom servers designed by its Data Center Solutions division for web giants such as Yahoo and Facebook and flog them them to a wider range of companies.

So far Dell kit has been used by large companies, such as Ask.com and Microsoft's Azure division, which order tens of thousands of servers.

But according to Andy Rhodes, a director with Dell's DCS group, the cunning plan now is it turn some of those custom servers into standardised products and sell them to companies that order smaller volumes of systems.

Apparently there's cash to be made from enterprises building "private cloud" environments in their data centres and a second tier of smaller Internet companies.

Dell plans to call the servers Cloudedge and they will come bundled with software tools for a variety of usage scenarios, including building and managing public and private clouds.

The line will compete with HP's Extreme Scale-Out systems and with IBM's dense Idataplex servers.

The company is not talking much about specific hardware yet, so there are few clues as to what Dell's Cloudedge will look like. However one server it mentioned uses Nano processors from Via and stuffs 12 server boards into a single 2U chassis. However it is thought that most systems will use Intel and AMD chips.

PC World thinks these servers will be out sometime this year. µ