Dell has launched a data centre environmental assessment service to evaluate the physical environment of data centres, taking airflow, cooling and power requirements into consideration.
"As organisations pack more systems into their data centres, providing adequate power and cooling becomes a critical concern," says Neil Hand, Dell enterprise product group VP.
The service, which is similar to offerings from other vendors such as HP and Sun Microsystems, is aimed at expanding Dell`s range of proactive and front-end services.
"As hardware and software technologies become increasingly standardised and predictable, Dell sees support services as becoming increasingly important in terms of competitive advantage and product differentiation," says Hand.
Data centre design and development for the enterprise is an area of the industry that has been neglected in the past, he adds.
"Although organisations are putting more into their data centres, relatively few have access to services for designing and managing power and cooling requirements because these services are either not available or too expensive to implement."
Dell developed the service in response to findings that a trend among customers reporting they were getting diminished service out of servers was mainly due to overheating.
"Dell created some design tools to give customers at low cost the ability to model how data centres should be laid out, creating hot and cold aisles, for example, to ensure cooling is more efficient," says Hand.
"Instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars for consulting services, Dell`s service is available for around the cost of a server for smaller data centres."
The service, which is already available in the US, will be rolled out to Europe and other regions later this year.
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