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In a previous post I wrote about a black-ops visit to the engineering lab where I filmed a demonstration of an amazing SSD mounting solution for the R310 developed by Zac Cravens. At the end of that post I mentioned that he had more to share, so here it is.

The room hummed with energy from the hundreds of pieces of electronics working away around us. Zac lifted his hand and gestured to a nearby table where a silent and lifeless PowerEdge R510-12 sat helplessly awaiting its next task. I couldn’t contain my anticipation and foolishly leapt to the server’s side. I had to wait for Zac to walk over and remove the cover where he commenced his description of the innovative work he and his team did:

Caption: Video available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tMV43xn4Ak

Zac succinctly explained the work performed to Pivot3’s scrupulous requirements and I contemplated the limitlessness of Dell’s OEM engineering capabilities. What cannot be done?

To summarize the video: Pivot3, one of our OEM customers, needed a high-capacity storage server with twelve 3.5” hot-swap hard drives PLUS two internal 2.5” hard drives – a standard offering. In addition, and this is where it gets groovy, they wanted to also add a flash DOM (Disk on Module) to one of the SATA ports on the R510 motherboard to act as the boot device. While the SATA port was already there to support a SATA optical drive, we didn’t have any power headers or cables near that location to power the DOM. So Zac and team designed and built a little cable adapter to pull power from the nearby internal 2.5” hard drive bays with a standard power socket into which the common DOM power cable can plug into. Then they designed and built a shortened version of the DOM power cable to connect to the new power adapter.

It is elegant, and reusable with other potential design requests our customers may come up with. I am floored!

What Zac didn’t speak about was the BIOS modifications our firmware & BIOS engineers had to perform to get the DOM to be recognized and set as the primary boot device – not a trivial task by any means! What else can we do? My imagination is running wild!

If you are interested in learning what Dell OEM Solutions can do for your OEM appliance or compute platform, please visit our website and fill out an engagement form to have a representative contact you.