Dell is teaming upwith eBay to launch the Evergreen Innovation Center in a move to grab a piece of the hyper-scale data center market and leverage its existing enterprise offerings.
The center is housed in an existing building on Dell’s Austin campus and is drawing on the companies’ current workforce to staff it, a Dell spokeswoman told Dice News.
With the Innovation Center, Dell aims to offer customers the ability to scale out and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their data centers.
eBay brings its Digital Service Efficiency (DSE) methodology to the table. That allows the service to analyze the efficiency of data centers and provides a wide view into their infrastructure performance and impact on business outcomes.
“eBay’s approach to thoughtful and meaningful quantification of its IT operations relative to the company’s business objectives results in a different kind of data center technology prioritization, exploration and development,” says Forrest Norrod, Dell Server Solutions General Manager.
Dell and eBay plan to analyze aspects of the data center from CPU to cooling methodologies.
Dell’s Data Play
Data center customers play a significant role in Dell’s efforts to right its struggling financial ship as founder Michael Dell seeks to take the company private.
In the first quarter, Dell posted a 2 percent decline in revenues to $14.1 billion. Its bright spot, however, was a 10 percent increase in revenues, to $3.1 billion, for its Enterprise Solutions Group, which includes its data center business.
At the time, Dell said it was focusing on ways to improve its competitive position in key areas of its business. Like Dell, Cisco also reported a boost to its revenues from its data center growth. And earlier this year, arch-rival HP released its Moonshot microserver to give it a run in the hyperscale data market, as well.
Dell’s hyper-scale data servers, otherwise called density optimized servers by IDC, increased their market share by 3 percentage points in the first quarter, according to a report released Thursday by the research firm. Dell, which continues to rank in third place based on worldwide server revenues, was “helped in part by strong demand from their density optimized data center solutions business,” IDC said.
