01/26/2004 — Dell Servers Put to Test in December Blizzard that Crippled the Northeast

Round Rock, Texas, January 26, 2004

weather.com, the web site of The Weather Channel® , has chosen Dell systems to refresh its server technology in order to better serve its customers. The company's decision to rely on Dell technology resulted in speedy delivery of important weather and traffic conditions to weather.com users during the season's first winter storm.

With the help of Dell(TM) PowerEdge servers running SUSE Linux, weather.com was able to improve the reliability and speed of information to its customers during a severe winter storm on Dec.5, 2003. The storm left 6-8 inches of snow in most coastal areas from the Carolinas to Maine and as much as three feet of snow in areas inland and generated wind gusts of up to 80 mph. The first northeastern storm of the year resulted in poor road conditions and traffic accidents, closed airports, schools and businesses, cancelled sporting and cultural events and loss of power to residents some regions. Desperate for information, more than 5.2 million people visited weather.com, one of the world's leading sources of weather on the Web.

According to Dan Agronow, vice president of technology for weather.com, the site served up more than 34 million page views on Dec. 5, 2003, - most of them dynamically generated - at an average response time of 1.31 seconds that day. This response time beat the Keynote Business 40 Internet Performance Index of 2.16 seconds for that day, which measures the average download time for the home pages of 40 important US-based business Web Sites in major U.S. metropolitan areas.

"The fact that we were able to serve up pages to our users in shorter time than the Keynote Index is a credit to the power and performance of our Dell servers," said Agronow. "Dell enterprise products offer the outstanding performance, horizontal scalability, faster memory and higher capacity that we need to provide the best possible weather and related information to our customers."

Dell has provided weather.com with over 110 PowerEdge(TM) servers running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for its technology refresh. Dell servers are used throughout the infrastructure for Web and application functions. To further ensure system uptime, Dell and SUSE Linux jointly support the servers through a recent agreement that establishes a single point of contact for issue resolution.

"Whether our customers are experiencing severe weather, planning a vacation or just trying to decide when to play a round of golf, they've come to depend on the information we provide," said Agronow. "Partnering with Dell will help us continue to be the most reliable and popular source of weather information on the Web."

Joe Marengi, senior vice president, Dell Americas, said the real-time, massive flow of information on weather.com is testament to the speed and power of the hardware on which it runs.

"Standards-based hardware and the software running on it continues to drive deeper in the data centers of sophisticated businesses like weather.com," he said. "It's our mission to push that along and continue to drive costs down for all our customers."

About weather.com

weather.com, the Web site of The Weather Channel® is the world's leading source of weather on the Web. The site helps users plan for everyday life by delivering current conditions and forecasts for 98,000 locations worldwide and providing relevant lifestyle content. weather.com averages 20 million unique users each month and is consistently ranked the most popular source of online weather information and among the Top 15 of all Web domains according to Nielsen//NetRatings. weather.com is also the leading provider of broadband and wireless weather products via high-speed Internet services, cell phones, pagers, Palm Pilots, and other personal digital assistants. Partnerships include America Online, Yahoo!, Excite Networks, MSNBC.com, USAToday.com, AT&T WorldNet, ABCNews.com, Digital City, Road Runner, Verizon Wireless, Cingular, AT&T Wireless, Sprint, Nextel and Palm Computing.

About Dell

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) is a premier provider of products and services required for customers worldwide to build their information-technology and Internet infrastructures. Company revenue for the past four quarters totaled $39.7 billion. Dell, through its direct business model, designs, manufactures and customizes products and services to customer requirements, and offers an extensive selection of software and peripherals. Information on Dell and its products can be obtained at www.dell.com.

Press Contact:
Jasmin Ul-Haque
Novell, Inc
Phone: +44 (0)1344 326-900
E-mail: juh@novell.com