Not terribly long ago, Dell CEO Michael Dell announced via social media that a customer had purchased $50,000 worth of equipment using nothing but bitcoin.
The cost of the transaction was 85 bitcoins, and we assumed (along with others) that the customer must have purchased quite a few servers.
Wrong. As it turns out, the $50,000 order was for just one server, NEWSBTC has learned.
Shortly after our post on the news in early August, I received an email from an individual claiming to have made the purchase — wanting to clarify that it was just one PowerEdge server that had been purchased, and not multiple.
“We plan to buy many more,” I was told by the client, who does not wish to be named publicly at this time. “It is for a bitcoin related project that will launch soon. It is not mining related.”
85 bitcoins for one server isn’t chump change, and they’ve beefed up the PowerEdge R920 server (which starts at close to $10,000 at its base configuration) quite a bit.
“We want to power our service with the best hardware available,” I was told. “This server supports 60 Intel E7 cores, 6TB of RAM, 24 drives, and quite a bit more. At least one, possibly two, will be at each of our data centers, which are strategically placed around the world.”
He adds, “the original server price was much higher. Dell happens to have good discounts [and] promos.”
Even in speaking to me, the details were scarce, but I’m told that that reason for the purchase is because “cloud solutions for 95% of what [they] are doing is not feasible.”
In configuring the PowerEdge R920 server on the Dell website, I was able to easily bring the cost past $50,000. As one would come to expect with such a price tag, the server is designed for a high workload environment.
It will certainly be interesting to see what project this is going into in the months ahead.