Yesterday, I talked to Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager of Dell's Data Center Solutions Division, who unveiled this new business unit that sits inside the company's Product Group.

This is an evolution of the Dell model, from configure to order to design to order. The idea is that for a certain class of customers that have hyper scale data centers, optimising the solutions for their environment make sense. We take our direct relationships to a new level, very deeply engaged with the architects and the computer scientists of our customers to understand what drives performance of applications that they try to run on their server fleet and the capabilities and limitations of their physical plants and networking infrastructure. And then we'll design a solution (and everything is on the table), at a minimum rack level but truely at the data center level, that is optimised for what they are trying to do and the infrastructure they are trying to host it

It just seems surprising to me that prior to DCS, Dell was just not adressing a segment that it itself describes as close to 10% of the overall server volume and growing much faster than the rest of the market. And that's just counting the top 2 dozens customers in the world.

We formerly took this off at the beginning at the year. We did a bit of incumbation before that but we're focus this year on a few customers. We already have deep engagements with a dozen customers and prototypes or production level equipment in about little over half of them.

Later that day, I contacted HP and Sun Microsystems about Dell's announcement. For HP, Dell is just not a capable nor consulting company, which DCS is all about.

First Dell needs to move beyond being a box supplier and move up the food chain and offer services. HP has been beating Dell at delivering systems and now they want to try to get into services. The problem is that HP already has massive service capabilities built over years and years of experience and success in the real world. The Dell talk about delivering to Web 2.0 companies is a pure marketing gimmick. It makes it seem as if they are moving into a new, emerging market. Sounds really newsworthy if they wrap Web 2.0 around services.

At Sun, Dell's latest "evolution" is something they have always done.

In the Sun Customer Ready program, we can definitely build-to-order, starting with the server designs that we offer and adjusting the quantity/type of components installed. We routinely create and build unique configurations of servers and storage for specific customers, including addition of 3rd party hardware/software components and customer-provided software. Many of the customers that frequently use this capability are service providers and/or Fortune 100.

Fair and balanced, isn't it?