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What do you put your success in the Linux market down to?
Well, we have been successful in helping customers convert from Unix. What those customers feel most comfortable with is what they view as an open source version of Unix. We were one of the earliest and one of the biggest, Ref Hat customers, in terms of selling their product on our servers. Now we are in the process of approving Novell/SUSE Linux as a "Tier 1" offering. What that means is we go through a tremendous amount of testing, validation and certification for Red Hat and SUSE, as well as offering first and second level support for customers on the hardware and the operating system.

So the overwhelming majority of calls that come in on Red Hat today, we actually solve as a Dell organization and don’t pass them off to Red Hat to resolve their issues. What that means for the customer is they have one point of accountability, and it is easier to get their issues resolved.

How is the relationship with VMware? Are you getting a lot of interest in virtualisation?
Are we hearing a lot [about virtualisation]? Yes. Are customers deploying? Yes. It has been one of those technologies where the reality has, in some cases, even outweighed the hype associated with it. In terms of Dell's role: number one, we provide virtualisation and it is a growing part of our services business. So with us it will means supporting the hardware virtualisation technologies through out BIOS and drivers, etc.

How do you charge customers for that service?
Well what we offer is very specific advice which we can give them through looking at what sort of environment they are going to run, what sort of workloads they are going to be under, what they want to accomplish and so on. So based on that we can generate a report for them that says the should be considering the following server hardware platforms, they should expect the following number of virtual machines per physical server, we would expect a certain amount of savings from them over time and then our recommendations on how they should go and implement that. And then we can go and do some of the implementation for them.

My favourite quote on virtualisation is that it is a technology that can mean virtually anything to virtually anybody.

You are claiming to get power savings from the new servers. How are you achieving that?
A large part of it is down to what Intel has done with their new architecture on the 5100 series, Woodcrest as it has been known. The wattage on the CPUs themselves is 65 watts on the majority of SKUs, down from somewhere around 130 watts. That is a big component of the power saving.

Then you look for a server vendor to complement that with technology and innovations around the box. Two or three years ago, power supply efficiency in general was at about 55 percent at 100 percent utilisation and now it is at 75 percent.

Then fans and cooling in general can be one of the biggest power draws. In systems of the past, fans just run and run and run. We have what we call the "low flow initiative" which you can think of as throttling the fan dynamically, depending on the workload and the thermal environment.

These are areas that we are investing heavily in. We are part of the Green Grid and other initiatives. We have built the thermal dynamics lab in Austin, where we can experiment with cooling and all kings of environments - - hot aisles, cold aisles, hoods, specific cooling units, and so on. Again, that has been one of the most popular visits to Dell.