Dell Puts Crosshairs on World of Storage
Summary
The office was built by onetime computer giant Digital Equipment Corporation in 1980, and as with so many of Dells acquisitions, the idea is to bring back the sort of engineering culture that pervaded DEC in its heyday. The company now offers everything from PCs to servers and storage to big tech consulting services, and thanks all those acquisitions, it plans on doing more and more of its own research and development. The side effect is that virtualization shifts computing infrastructure away from distributed pizza-box-style servers, and toward centralized densely packed racks of processors and disk drives. When Dell opened its new office in Silicon Valley, it called the place a Research and Development Center, and its staff includes the former employees of Ocarina. But he believes that although the company wont make as much headway as it would like among the big enterprise businesses, it has a chance to be very successful in the "midrange market" – i.e. among smaller outfits.