Dell’s teased something interesting ahead of next week’s DellWorld gabfest: a “micro Modular Data Center (MDC)” that can be deployed outdoors if required.

As depicted above (or here for those of you on our mobile site) Dell’s offering has three racks. One will hold the company’s DSS 9000 rack scale infrastructure that our sibling site The Next Platform has detailed as capable of holding up to 96 compute nodes. The other two racks hold power and cooling equipment.

Dell says the MDC can be “… placed indoors or outdoors, leveraging outside air or mechanical cooling technologies.”

Why would anyone want 96 weatherproof compute nodes standing on the street? As we’ve previously explored, plenty of thinking about the Internet of Things suggests putting processing at the edge of the network to save comms costs and save the data centre core for jobs known to be worth doing. This MDC concept will help with such rigs. It will also help telcos who want to preserve core network capacity by putting compute and content out where their users are. And that can mean putting compute capacity next to mobile base stations, hence the possibility of outdoor use.

Or perhaps this is one for serious domestic bit barn builders who have run out of roof space or have been told their computers are no longer welcome in the house. ®

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