What do a wind farm developer, a clothing manufacturer,

a maritime security and tracking services provider, and

three institutions of higher learning have in common?

They heightened IT efficiency, reliability, and performance

using Dell™ blade servers.

Efficiency has become the watchword across virtually every

line of business. The good news is that technology advances

in today’s blade server infrastructures make it a snap to

optimize data center efficiency and manageability—enabling

organizations around the world to invest newfound IT cost savings

in initiatives that inspire innovation and accelerate growth.

The success stories highlighted here represent a small but

diverse sample of how organizations are putting Dell PowerEdge™

blade servers to work in ways that help maximize IT efficiency

and flexibility, whether to consolidate data center resources,

boost savings on power and cooling, virtualize servers for rapid

deployment, or process data-intensive applications on a high-

performance computing (HPC) platform. Their results may

surprise you.

16 2010 Issue 03 | dell.com/powersolutions

Blade solutions for the Efficient Data Center

Cutting-edge agility

Featuresection

Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, 2010 Issue 3. Copyright © 2010 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.

dell.com/powersolutions | 2010 Issue 03 17

“ We’re confident that scientific users and engineers from across the nation will benefit from the reliability and performance of the Dell blade solution.”— David Lifka

Director at Cornell CAC

April 2010

Cornell University: Simplifying HPC solutions on the TeraGrid

HPC is the backbone of the work performed

by the Cornell University Center for Advanced

Computing (CAC), which supports Cornell

researchers and students from scientific

disciplines across the United States. The

center recently received a National Science

Foundation grant to deploy the MATLAB

numerical computing environment to a cluster

called “MATLAB on the TeraGrid.” The goal was

to demonstrate a working model for high-

performance utility computing with MATLAB,

and to encourage other software vendors to

develop similar capabilities.

The cluster uses Dell PowerEdge M600 blade

servers with Intel Xeon 5420 processors running

the Microsoft® Windows® HPC Server 2008

platform and DataDirect Networks storage.

Force10 Networks switches were sourced

through Dell. This HPC cluster allows a wide

range of scientific researchers and students to

use MATLAB to help reduce the time to solution

in a seamless experience, without having to

tackle the complexity and intricacies of parallel

computing. For example, external researchers

were able to remotely access all 512 cores of the

MATLAB cluster to model a hepatitis C virus, a

major cause of liver disease worldwide.

“We’re confident that scientific users and

engineers from across the nation will benefit from

the reliability and performance of the Dell blade

solution while, on the IT side, Cornell will benefit

from reduced power and space requirements and

the ability to maintain the blades with in-house

staff,” says CAC director David Lifka.

RES: Running like the wind on Dell blade servers

For rapidly growing wind farm developer

Renewable Energy Systems (RES), a power-efficient

HPC platform is mission critical. Having built

more than 80 wind farms around the globe, RES

continues to expand into new regions, including

Turkey and South Africa, and had to upgrade its

existing Dell HPC solution to quickly and accurately

assess these complex emerging markets.

Minimizing its carbon footprint and saving

space were key requirements, particularly because

an RES sister company was hosting the system

until a new data center could be built. Because

IT resources were scarce, simplified systems

management was also essential.

The Dell Global Infrastructure Consulting

Services team worked closely with RES to

understand its needs, and recommended

an energy-efficient HPC cluster built on

16 Dell PowerEdge M610 blade servers with

Intel® Xeon® X5550 processors running

Platform Cluster Manager – Dell Edition software.

Mounted in a PowerEdge M1000e modular

blade enclosure and connected with Dell

PowerConnect™ M6220 switches, the cluster

easily fits in the space available, and includes

a Dell PowerVault™ MD1000 direct attach array

for high-volume storage.

“Now we can complete the job in two to

three weeks—approximately 20 times faster—

which means we can get wind farms in place

quicker,” says Peter Stuart, technical manager at

RES. In addition, the company has reduced power

consumption by approximately 75 percent and

freed up valuable IT staff time.

Dell blade servers optimize data center efficiency—and boost organizational agility—through exceptional computing density, energy efficiency, network integration, and manageability

Powerful performance

In this video, learn more about how Dell blade servers helped RES meet its need for a high-performance, energy-efficient cluster.

youtube.com/watch?v= cwkDh-_pVnk

Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, 2010 Issue 3. Copyright © 2010 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.

18 2010 Issue 03 | dell.com/powersolutions

Blade solutions for the Efficient Data CenterFeaturesection

Pacific Sunwear: Taking a shine to huge time savings

Performance and reliability are essential for

clothing chain Pacific Sunwear (PacSun) of

California. This top teen fashion retailer relies on

its high-speed reporting system to collect data

from stores daily, spot trends, and coordinate

deliveries with its distribution center in Kansas.

This system helps ensure that the latest products

reach stores in time to meet demand. If an IT

system goes down, it can affect the entire sales

chain and result in missed opportunities.

When PacSun needed to refresh its

infrastructure to increase availability, reduce costs,

simplify management, and enhance business

agility, it created a virtualized data center with

VMware® vSphere™ virtualization software running

on Dell PowerEdge M610 blade servers with

Intel Xeon 5500 series processors and a Dell

EqualLogic™ PS Series iSCSI (Internet SCSI)

storage area network (SAN).

“From a three-year ROI standpoint, we

could easily double our return with a virtualized

environment versus just replacing old servers with

new physical machines,” says Ira Ham, director

of network and information security at PacSun.

“Virtualization could also help us deploy new

applications faster and open up space in the data

center for growth.”

PacSun has also dramatically decreased its

operating expenses by eliminating more than

100 servers through virtualization, while simplified

storage management has resulted in a 20 percent

reduction in administrative time.

Thomas College: Making the grade in server reduction

Server consolidation through virtualization is

important to private liberal arts school Thomas

College in Maine, which serves more than

1,100 students with a cutting-edge IT infrastructure

designed to offer the latest Microsoft communication

and collaboration tools. The college’s IT department

needed a simplified system that would allow it to

provide high-performance laptops, desktops, and

portable computers while increasing management

efficiency in the data center. The college became

an early adopter of Microsoft Windows 7 on

Dell OptiPlex™ desktops and Dell Latitude™ laptops,

enabling IT staff to image computers more quickly

than in previous OS versions.

In the data center, Thomas is consolidating on

virtualized Dell PowerEdge M600 and PowerEdge

M610 blade servers with Intel Xeon processors

running the Microsoft Hyper-V™ platform—a

move that has helped the college consolidate

its footprint by 50 percent and reduce heat

generation by more than 30 percent, thereby

saving on power and cooling costs. Microsoft

System Center Virtual Machine Manager enables

IT staff to repair and upgrade physical hosts

without interrupting users simply by moving the

virtual machine images to a different blade server,

eliminating half of the planned downtime. And IT

staff can also set up a virtual machine in half an

hour, making it easy to accommodate evolving

needs of the Thomas faculty.

75%An energy-efficient cluster of Dell blade servers helped RES reduce power consumption by roughly 75 percent while minimizing the server footprint.

RES

512 coresCornell CAC demonstrated a utility that helped simplify a complex scientific solution involving access to all 512 cores of a Dell blade server cluster.

Cornell University

100 serversVirtualization on Dell blade servers helped Pacific Sunwear eliminate more than 100 physical servers and reduce administrative time by 20 percent.

Pacific Sunwear

50%Consolidation on Dell blade servers enabled Thomas College to reduce its server footprint by 50 percent and lower heat generation by 30 percent.

Thomas College

Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, 2010 Issue 3. Copyright © 2010 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.

dell.com/powersolutions | 2010 Issue 03 19

Pole Star: Navigating maritime security requirements

When the International Maritime Organization

issued a regulation stating that every ship at sea

must report its position four times a day, Pole Star

Space Applications Ltd., a UK-based provider of

maritime security and satellite-enabled tracking

technology, anticipated a massive increase in sales

volume. With the new law pending, Pole Star had

less than 12 months to prepare its infrastructure

for the rise in demand.

The organization was running Dell servers in

hot standby clusters for high availability, but this

approach was relatively expensive and required new

hardware every three years. The company needed a

powerful environment that could scale quickly with

minimum expense, and recognized virtualization

as a flexible and easy-to-deploy solution. Working

with Dell, Pole Star IT staff designed and deployed

VMware vSphere virtualization on Dell PowerEdge

M600 blade servers with Intel Xeon E5410

processors and Dell EqualLogic storage, protected

by Dell ProSupport for IT.

The move to Dell blade servers cut the

physical server footprint by 83 percent, and

Pole Star estimates that the current virtualized

environment will serve business needs for the next

five years even with an anticipated 50 percent

growth in business volume within the next three

years. “We’re expanding rapidly, and having the

technology to support that process is incredibly

important,” says James Bayley, consultant head of

IT for Pole Star. “The Dell solution has delivered on

the promise of business agility.”

Stony Brook University: Leading the pack with Dell PowerEdge servers

Dell performance, reliability, and speed were

all put to the test—literally—when the Stony

Brook University team at the Supercomputing

Conference (SC) Student Cluster Competition

needed the components of an HPC cluster to beat

competing universities in processing large data

sets and compute-intensive scientific applications.

In the spirit of preparing students and

attracting interest in HPC, SC sponsors an annual

competition in which students compete on the

basis of benchmarking and scientific problem

solving. A quick response from Dell enabled the

Stony Brook University team to build an HPC

cluster of five PowerEdge M905 blade servers with

20 six-core AMD Opteron™ 2435 processors and

a 40 Gbps InfiniBand interconnect provided by

Mellanox Technologies.

As a result of Dell’s rapid response and the

system’s ease of deployment and simplified

configuration, cluster setup was quick, and the

students had the time they needed to prepare for

the event. The Stony Brook team came away with

the honors, and Dell performance was critical to

success: “The amount of memory we had on the

Dell machines allowed us to run much larger data

sets than the other teams, which was definitely a

factor in our winning,” says Aaron Pellman-Isaacs,

senior biology major and team leader.

Dell PowerEdge blade servers:

Standardized platforms for flexible growth

As IT decision makers run a gauntlet of financial and organizational

challenges, Dell PowerEdge blade servers ease the way with a compact

form factor designed to increase operational efficiency, reliability,

and manageability while saving big on power and cooling expense.

PowerEdge blade servers also provide diverse IT environments with

the computational density and intelligent fabric integration needed

to optimize availability and performance for a world of applications.

The six success stories featured here demonstrate that big results

can indeed come in a very small package.

Stony Brook University finished first at the SC Student Cluster Competition thanks to Dell blade server performance.

1st place83%Virtualization on Dell blade servers cut Pole Star’s physical server footprint by 83 percent while supporting an anticipated 50 percent growth.

Pole Star Stony Brook University

Reprinted from Dell Power Solutions, 2010 Issue 3. Copyright © 2010 Dell Inc. All rights reserved.