Misunderstanding the Target Market

Gaze with wonder upon the glory that is the Dell 6950! Holding a ridiculous amount of processors and hosting an obscene amount of RAM, this information powerhouse is designed to serve the enterprise as the backbone of its server farm. Twin 1570 watt power supplies ensure constant uptime and four hot-swappable fans keep the temperature down in spite of an available AMD architecture and a face full of SATA drive slots.

The specification I tend to be most concerned with is, however, the base weight. 82lbs of awkwardly angled steel make up this beast. When coupled with the fact that it seems fated to slide into racks in which the bottom slots are already full, it is a nightmare to lever into place. It is so heavy, in fact, that once in place even DOA servers that never boot may just stay there forever -- LEDs forever dark in tribute to the monumental effort it took just to get it there.

Why, I ask, not aluminum? How about fiberglass or some type of heat-resistant plastic? Steel? Really? Steel lined with lead in case someone with X-Ray vision wants to hang out in the server room frantically jotting down a series of 1's and 0's to later decrypt into valuable data?

Dell, in designing this beast of a device, has failed to take into account the average upper body strength of members of the I.T. set. In so doing, they have made at least one (that I know of) curse their name in anger with profanity foul (and creative) enough to turn heads as far away as the break room.

And speaking of the break room . . . Last week we suffered a terrible loss. The brand-new CJ-2000 robotic coffee . . . making . . . automatic . . . pod-based . . . thing developed a leak in its heating tank, at once covering the countertop in hot water and filling half the floor with pore-opening steam. It did not recover.

We have not been notified what the plans are for the future. We do not know if the space it once occupied will ever be filled.

The repair tech did leave the rack of pods. Consequently I have learned that in desperate times a person can chew an espresso pod directly and forego the hassle of heating water altogether. Score one for "Team Efficiency".

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