James Niccolai, IDG News wrote a funny story that I thought I would share with everyone comparing Willy Wonka and the Dell Factory.

He states:

If Dell’s cloud server lab is a candy shop for geeks, littered with components and exotic system designs, then Jimmy Pike is the Willy Wonka of servers.

Pike, a jolly man with grey hair and seemingly boundless energy, is in charge of server design at Dell’s Data Center Solutions division, which builds custom servers to meet the high-density and low-power needs of online giants like Microsoft and Facebook, as well as other “hyperscale” computing customers.

He works in a small lab in Building 2 of Dell’s Parmer campus in Round Rock, Texas. Last week he gave a rare tour of his lab to a reporter, showing off some one-of-a-kind designs that Dell built for individual customers, and two other systems that will be released soon to a wider market under Dell’s new PowerEdge C brand.

Like IBM and Hewlett-Packard, Dell was late to the cloud server game. Verari and Rackable Systems were first to show there was a market for dense, low-power servers that strip out nonessential components and software to suit the unique needs of cloud computing providers. Dell and its rivals have since jumped on board.