Dell Introduces a New Hyperscale Rack Architecture to Bring Flexibility and Efficiency

FREMONT, CA: Dell announces a new hyperscale rack design aiming mid and large scale businesses.

The new DSS 9000 hyperscale rack architecture is a server technology that allows computing and storage resources to be decoupled and is based on Intel's Rack Scale Architecture that is meant to bring configuration flexibility and power efficiency to Web-scale tasks.

The company has two groups DCS (Data Center solutions and services) and DSS (Datacenter Scalable solutions). The hyper-scale rack architecture is already made available to the largest companies through the DCS and it will be made available to mid-range customers through the recently formed DSSgroup.

Stephen Rousset, Engineer and Director of Architecture at Dell’s Extreme Scale Infrastructure, says that “the new architecture will aim the customers who want to install a few thousand servers in their data center”.

Hyperscale rack architecture allows giant enterprises like Facebook, Google the flexibility to decouple storage & computing. Hyperscale computing allows businesses to quickly provision and add computing resources, such as processors and memory, in separate racks, or pools. Customers can configure a rack depending on how much power consumption, processing capabilities or storage they want to assign

Each Rack can hold up to 80 compute modules or 40 storage modules, both storage and compute modules can also be combined in these Racks. They come with multiple network switches and power-bays. The main advantage of this architecture is that web services can be scaled up easily as the computing resources are closer to each other, this enable higher flexibility to facilitate storage.

Intel has been impelling silicon photonics, a faster way of data transfer among computer chips to connect the racks over long distances.