March 2008 - Posts

• Recent Opinion on SSD Failure Rates Fails to Include the Facts

  Wed. Mar. 19, 2008
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  Sometimes we have to react to information that has no basis in reality. That's what we're dealing with here.

  A recent analyst document from Avian Securities incorrectly stated that Dell is seeing high return rates (20 - 30%) due to performance issues and failures on solid state disk drives (SSDs). It has been the basis of conversations in the blogosphere like Crave, Gizmodo, Techcrunch and BloggingStocks.

  Here's the real story: the 20 - 30% failure and return rates cited by Avian Securities don't even vaguely resemble what's happening in our business. It's also true that Avian did not contact us while doing their research. Said another way, it's just not true.

  Our global reliability data shows that SSD drives are equal to or better than traditional hard disk drives we've shipped. Beyond that, return rates for SSDs are in line with our expectations for new technology and an order of magnitude better than rates reported in the press.

  The vast majority of our customers who purchased these drives appreciate the benefits that SSD drives offer: increased durability, fast start up, better reliability and improved access times.

  In her earlier blog post, Sarah Williams from our product group mentioned that first-generation SSD drives performed on par with 5400RPM laptop hard drives overall. She also said that we're now offering second-generation Samsung's SATA II drives (we call them Dell Flash Ultra Performance SSD) that outperform existing laptop (and even some fast desktop) hard drives. 

  Whether we're talking about a new technology or an established one, Dell is extremely strict on quality variations. Hard drive quality in particular is closely monitored by virtue of its job: to store customer data. Computers can be easily replaced—customer data cannot.

  We remain committed to SSD technology and see it as a key technology that will advance mobile computing overall. Because of this, we will continue our efforts to offer them across a variety of consumer and business laptops and mobile workstations.

  Update: EqualLogic blogger Marc Farley weighed in on the topic here. Very soon, he will be joining the Direct2Dell family to contribute to a new group blog we'll be launching soon called Inside IT. More details coming.

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• New Dell Servers Offer Small Businesses Big Performance and Value

  Tue. Mar. 18, 2008
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  Many small and medium business customers have similar technology needs as larger companies. Things like performance, reliability and affordability matter just as much or more to small business owners. To meet those requirements, we designed two single-socket servers that support up to a quad-core Xeon processor, unprecedented memory expandability, and several redundancy features. These servers are available to customers worldwide starting today (Update: These servers will be available to customers in Latin America beginning March 25). Regardless of what server small and medium business customers choose, they can bet on performance and features that outdo many other single-socket servers available today.

  There's a lot of similarities between the PowerEdge T300 and the R300 servers. Both of them utilize the Intel 5100 chipset, and both support a wide range of processors, including Intel Celeron, Core 2 Duo, Xeon 3000 series, Xeon 5000 series. Additionally, the PowerEdge R300 also supports the Xeon low-voltage L5410 processor. Both servers also support up to 24GB DDR2 ECC memory, so businesses can run memory-apps with ease. Both servers can be ordered with many versions on Windows Server up to Windows Server 2008, Red Hat Linux Enterprise 5, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and 10.

  From a reliability standpoint, both offer hot-plug hard drives and redundant power supplies. They also support several different RAID options as well, and both can be managed with Dell's OpenManage suite of tools.

  Both offer lots standard security features like Trusted Platform Module support, a locking bezel and chassis intrusion switch to protect against unauthorized access to hard drives and other peripherals, and a locked-down internal USB port.

  Through ProSupport, Dell offers a range of services to fit the needs of any small or medium business. See Cary Gumbert's post for more details on what I mean there.  

  The R300 is a 1U rack server that starts at $1,299. Click on the images below to pull up larger versions.

  

  And the PowerEdge T300 is a tower server that starts at $999:

  

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