About a year and a half ago, when OnLive had put its cloud gaming tech together, it needed to design the servers to house its PCI video wizardry and host the games it was running, so it hired Dell’s DCS unit to do the job. The exact feeds and speeds of the OnLive systems are a closely guarded secret (and include some 250 patents), but Rhodes was at liberty to say that OnLive was not using a blade form factor, but instead a rack machine that was packing multiple servers into a single 1U rack box, a setup with enough oomph to run games and PCI-Express slots for the proprietary graphics cards for remotely displaying games over the browser.
The OnLive “cloud gaming” system has been in development for eight years and is embodied in millions of lines of code for running popular console-based games on servers, and a proprietary PCI-Express 2.0 card that crunches video and sends it over the intertubes to render those games in a browser. According to Andy Rhodes, marketing director of Dell’s Data Center Solutions custom server outfit and one of the early testers of the OnLive service, it works.
