A Look Inside A Microserver-Powered Data Center

What does a microserver-driven data center look like? This morning Dell's Data Center Solutions group rolled out a new line of microservers optimized for web hosting companies. Microservers provide groups of dedicated compute nodes for scenarios where multi-core CPU architecture and extensive virtualization aren't effective solutions. As Dell's microserver design evolved, one of the primary customers for its offering was Online.net, a large hosting company based in France. Each system runs one OS and app per server, has one 1 CPU per server and features 12 servers per chassis (see Barton George's blog post for more details). The end result is a data center with an unusual appearance. It takes a couple of minutes to warm up, but gets interesting at about the 1:30 mark. This video runs about 11 minutes.

For more coverage of server form factors and designs, see our Servers Channel. For additional videos, check out our DCK video archive and the Data Center Videos channel on YouTube.