Dell Cops $30M Cargill Deal

Food producer Cargill is standardizing on Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq: DELL) servers in its data center as part of a $30 million deal to improve efficiency across its 90 different businesses.

As well as deploying Dells PowerEdge servers in its data center, the Minneapolis-based firm will also roll out the vendor’s notebooks and desktops across its global business. Over the next three years, Cargill plans to standardize on around 30,000 Dell systems in 61 countries.

Cargill has come a long way since the company started life as a small grain elevator in Conover, Iowa, in 1865, and the company now boasts 101,000 employees around the world, many of them working in rural locations.

“Cargill is a far-flung corporation,” says a company spokesman, "and a lot of our offices are not situated in major metropolitan areas, which presents many challenges, such as transport and lack of existing IT infrastructure."

The PowerEdge servers will be supported by a variety of Dell services, including system support and custom-built software. A centralized asset management system will be used to measure total cost of ownership.This is the latest high-profile win for Dell’s PowerEdge server range. In another technology upgrade project, Dell provided the Weather Channel's Website with more than 110 PowerEdge servers running SUSE Linux.

Last year, the John F.Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts unveiled a SAN that uses a combination of EMC software and PowerEdge servers.

— James Rogers, Site Editor, Next-gen Data Center Forum