Dell Computer severs roll down the assembly line at the Round Rock, Texas assembly facility, north of Austin. Datacenter Scalable Solutions, the new division Dell has created, sits between the company’s traditional business and its eight-year-old Data Center Solutions division that targets the largest data centre operators.

Bloomberg/San Francisco


Dell has created a new business division to sell servers to customers large enough to warrant some light customisation, but not so large that they’re designing and assembling their own equipment.
The new unit for the closely held company is named Datacenter Scalable Solutions and targets customers who may need thousands of slightly tweaked computer servers at a week’s notice, but aren’t so large that they’re designing and building their own servers with Asian companies such as Quanta Computer.
The division sits between Dell’s traditional business and its eight-year-old Data Center Solutions division that targets the largest data centre operators.
“DCS is Savile Row. You walk in and you’re picking fabrics and cuts and everything for your custom suit, that’s the DCS world,” said Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, the general manager of Dell Server Solutions, in an interview. DSS, by comparison, is more about alterations to an existing design, with a couple of areas of customisation, he said.
Dell estimates the market for traditional IT servers is almost $40bn, and the hyper-scale DCS market is worth about $9bn. DSS’s target audience fits between these two and is worth about $6bn and growing quickly, the Round Rock, Texas-based company said.
Dell, like rival Hewlett-Packard Co, is facing a change in the cloud market as large companies such as Baidu, Amazon.com and Google, design highly customised data centre servers and have them built at a low cost by suppliers such as Quanta.
This segment of the server market, called ODM Direct, grew 22% to sales of $974.9mn in the first quarter and represented 7.6% of the worldwide server market, according to data compiled by IDC.
Dell had an 18% share of the total global server market on sales of $2.3bn in the first quarter, but with a growth rate of 12.6%, according to IDC.
“Server design is like the PC market back in the ’80s,” said Ali Heydari, chief architect of data centres for Baidu, China’s biggest search engine. “You had the big names and eventually it became the Taiwanese companies.”
Dell has been catering to this competitive low-cost market for several years and counts large Chinese operators such as Baidu, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, and Tencent Holdings as customers, Marius Haas, Dell’s chief commercial officer, said in an interview. The company believes it can maintain its grip on these customers through a combination of its logistics skills and its experience, Haas said.
Dell has already talked to about 200 customers about its new Scalable Solutions products, he said. Dell is confident it will be able to sell to companies that, though large, are not so big they have developed the kind of global logistics capability needed to buy servers directly from an ODM and get them assembled and sent to their data centres.
Hewlett-Packard, meanwhile, recently announced a joint-venture with Foxconn Technology Group to develop similar servers. That venture has already resulted in about $1bn of booked business, Hewlett-Packard’s enterprise chief, Antonio Neri, said in a June interview.