With more than 80 wind farms around the globe, Renewable Energy Systems (RES) needed to update its IT system as it expanded into emerging markets. Using an energy-efficient cluster of Dell blade servers, RES reduced power consumption by 75 percent while minimizing the server footprint. What does it mean for RES? Wind farms get into place quicker.

 

The Cornell University Center for Advanced Computing received a National Science Foundation grant to deploy a computing environment called “MATLAB on the TeraGrid.” Today, students and researchers can remotely access all 512 cores of the center’s Dell blade server. The results can be powerful – one research team accessed the cluster to model a hepatitis C virus, a major cause of liver disease worldwide.

 

Performance and reliability are essential for clothing chain Pacific Sunwear (PacSun). This top teen fashion retailer relies on its high-speed reporting system to collect data, spot trends and coordinate deliveries. When PacSun needed to refresh its infrastructure, it created a virtualized data center running on Dell blade servers that enabled PacSun to eliminate more than 100 physical servers and reduce administrative time by 20 percent.

 

Private liberal arts school Thomas College serves its students with a cutting-edge IT infrastructure that gives them access to the latest communication and collaboration tools. When Thomas looked to simplify its server system, it consolidated on virtualized Dell blade servers – a move that helped the college shrink its server footprint by 50 percent and reduce heat generation by more than 30 percent.

 

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., anticipated a massive increase in sales volume – and had less than 12 months to prepare for the rise in demand. Working with Dell, Pole Star quickly deployed virtualization on blade servers, cutting its physical server footprint by 83 percent while supporting an anticipated 50 percent growth.

 

Dell performance, reliability and speed were all put to the test – literally – with the Stony Brook University team at the Supercomputing Conference Student Cluster Competition. Dell enabled the team to quickly build a cluster of five blade servers, and the Stony Brook team came away with the honors! “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,” said team leader Aaron Pellman-Isaacs.

 

As IT decision makers run a gamut of financial and organizational challenges, Dell PowerEdge blade servers ease the way. While small in design to increase operational efficiency, reliability and manageability, the servers save big on power and cooling expenses. PowerEdge blade servers truly provide diverse IT environments with the power to do more.

 

Indeed, the six success stories featured here demonstrate that big results can come in a very small package!