Not to be outdone by Cisco, Dell launches Xanadu II servers for clouds

With Sun and newly initiated server market competitor Cisco also rolling out data center servers this week, Dell has made its own announcement of XS-23 II servers, formerly codenamed Xanadu II. Dell launched the new high-end x86 servers on Monday in celebration of the second birthday of Data Center Solutions (DCS), a division producing servers aimed at easy customizability for cloud computing and other data center applications.

Forrest Norrod, Dell's VP and general manager of DCS, contended today that DCS "isn't a one-size fits all approach." Dell's new XS-23 servers, for example, come with a choice of several different processors, including the new Intel Nehalem chip that will also show up in Cisco's first servers, although those machines will be offered in blade configurations with a built-in fabric architecture.

Dell's XS-23 servers, in contrast, will be provided as four two-socket servers in a 2U standard rack mount footprint, accommodating up to 24 disk drives. Just as Sun is now doing with some of its high-end Sparc-based models, Dell is providing a choice between rotating and solid state disk (SSD) drives for its latest servers.

According to Norrod, customers can configure up to 88 of Dell's new servers with 704 processing cores and 396 TB of storage, plus switching, in a single rack, for 25% higher density in comparison to similarly outfitted blade servers on a per-U basis.