CIO blogger John Halamka of Harvard Medical School has posted a narrative of his IT team's recent tour of Dell's facilities in Texas. As Dell remains a major player in many IT department server rooms and data centers, it's worth keeping an eye on what they are up to and how they deploy their own hardware and software; since not all IT departments are large enough to be privy to an on-site briefing from the company on these matters, I think John's notes are well worth reading.

The major takeaway seems to be that, like many manufacturers, Dell is moving toward greener systems; new blade servers are in the offing, and considerable effort is being made to develop monitoring tools and variable demand equipment to fine tune power consumption to tasking. The company is also putting a lot of research in on data center design, which should pay dividends up and down their lines of servers... savings may be more significant when you are running a thousand machines, but it will still benefit you if you're running only ten or twenty.