Dell to stick with Intel

BANGALORE: Dispelling strong market speculation that it is considering using AMD Opteron chips for its servers, a senior Dell executive today stressed that it would continue its partnership with Intel.

“We are committed to Intel, which has consistently been bringing out processor lines. We are looking forward to the Woodcrest (Xeon processor) release that is due in late summer this year,” said Jeff Clarke, senior VP, product group, Dell Inc.

Woodcrest is touted as being an effective answer to AMD Opteron, with better performance and lower power consumption.

Responding to a question relating to rival vendors trying to veer away Dell customers to Opteron-based servers, he said that contrary to the perception, Opteron-based servers have not impacted the company's market share.

“Dell grew its server business 11 percent compared to a Opteron-based server vendor, which recorded zero percent growth last quarter. We continue to take in more share of the X86 server market,” he said.

Clarke added that Dell's next-generation server products would offer greater performance, thermal performance, would be easier to manage and deploy and would have better utilization rates.

Dell's overall global enterprise business including storage, servers, services and peripherals, recorded 21 percent YoY growth last quarter. The company's business outside the US increased in the quarter by 21 percent year-over-year.

Clarke said that Dell's Bangalore R&D center was of strategic importance to the company. The center does advanced engineering work around High performance computing, high ability clustering and Network Attached Storage products and server management stack. The India facility also spruces Dell's services offerings by developing Microsoft Exchange sizing tools that would help the company determine and build system architecture for its global clients.

Encouraged by the good results of the Indian R&D center, Dell now plans to double its existing engineering head count to 600. It also has plans to build some servers out of India.

Besides Bangalore, Dell has four other global R&D centers in Singapore, Shanghai, Taipei and Austin.

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