Dell introduces its ‘most advanced’ server portfolio

Dell has unveiled its most advanced and easy-to-manage portfolio of PowerEdge servers, designed to help customers worldwide address and optimise the evolving spectrum of application and workload requirements. The Dell PowerEdge 13th generation server portfolio features customer-inspired engineering built to optimise price performance for the widest range of web, enterprise and hyperscale applications, and features state-of-the-art advancements in storage, processing and memory technology coupled with industry-leading systems management capabilities.

The new Dell PowerEdge portfolio – which begins with five form-factors across blade, rack and tower servers – provides customers with choice in how they address industry trends including cloud computing, mobility, big data, and software-defined. More than 80 percent of IT decision-makers report these factors as investment priorities for the next 12 months, according to the Future Ready IT survey, recent worldwide research commissioned by Dell and Intel.

“Our customers are inundated with new pressures and challenges that simply didn’t exist a few years ago. The pace of technology development and disruption is undoubtedly increasing, and many IT organisations are trying to find the right balance of rolling out technology in new and exciting ways without adding more complexity to their environments,” said Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager, Dell Server Solutions. “By focusing on three underlying principles in our new PowerEdge server portfolio – accelerating application performance, empowering workloads in any environment, and simplification of systems management – customers can bridge between traditional and new IT models so they are always prepared to incorporate new innovations and stand up and optimise new applications within their data centres.”

Next generation PowerEdge server portfolio
The first of the new Dell PowerEdge servers includes the PowerEdge R730xd, R730, and R630 rack servers, the M630 blade server, and the T630 tower server, which are built with the latest Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v3 product family. Combined with Dell’s end-to-end portfolio of enterprise infrastructure offerings, software and services, the new PowerEdge servers enable increased levels of operational efficiency and flexibility at any scale for the most demanding applications and environments.

State-of-the-art storage speeds application performance
As businesses continue to run more data-intensive applications such as real-time analytics and transactional processing low-latency access to data becomes even more critical. In fact, the Future Ready IT survey reports that 70 percent of IT decision-makers (ITDMs) have been negatively affected by performance issues when running applications requiring fast access to data.

Dell’s new PowerEdge servers are designed to leverage modern storage technologies that enable customers to accelerate applications by bringing data closer to the processor for increased application performance.
· With cost effective 1.8-inch SATA flash drives, the Dell PowerEdge R630 can deliver customers up to 2.4 times the input/output operations per second (IOPS) in the same amount of space as 2.5-inch SSDs.
· With the PowerEdge R730xd, Dell also provides up to 100TB of storage for workloads such as Microsoft Exchange, where it also delivers up to a 50 percent increase in mailbox size over previous generation servers.

The new in-server storage technology allows customers to:
· Accelerate the most important data by offering high performance with NVMe Express Flash storage and deployment of Dell Fluid Cache for SAN and SanDisk DAS Cache.
· Zone large datasets by doubling the RAID performance with optional dual PERC9 controllers.

· Support software defined storage and optimised data placement by providing hybrid storage configurations within the compute node that enable tiering capabilities.
Dell also has introduced direct-attached storage offerings specifically developed for the new PowerEdge servers. The new Dell Storage MD1400 and MD1420 offer affordable storage expansion, double the bandwidth and improved performance compared to the previous generation, data security with self-encrypting-drives (SEDs), and seamless data management between the server and storage enclosure.

Industry-leading enhancements make systems management easier than ever
Sixty percent of IT managers polled in the Future Ready IT survey say they are prioritising reductions in operational complexity and simplification of data centre management with IT resource allocation. Dell’s updated systems management capabilities featured in its new PowerEdge servers are engineered to address these customer priorities, with higher levels of automation and by enabling administrators to monitor and remediate data centre situations from any hand-held device anywhere in the world. The OpenManage systems management portfolio also provides:
· Enhanced at-the-server management, and from anywhere: Dell introduces iDRAC Quick Sync, using Near Field Communication (NFC), an industry first, to enable its customers’ mobile workforce by requiring up to 84 percent less time for collecting inventory. For customers managing at-the-box, this new capability transmits server health information and basic server setup via a hand-held smart device running OpenManage Mobile, simply by tapping it at the server. OpenManage Mobile also enables administrators to monitor and manage their environments anytime, anywhere with their mobile device.
· New levels of automation: Administrators can save time and gain efficiency with zero-touch management automation features, such as storing, accessing, and deploying a Server Configuration Profile or firmware update from a central repository. Dell's Zero-Touch Repository Manager and auto-updates reduce firmware updating time by up to 92 percent.

Empowering workloads for any scale
With more than 60 percent of ITDMs reporting in the Future Ready IT survey that their company relies on a mix of traditional and emerging business applications, today’s data centres must support a diverse and broad set of workloads and applications. Dell’s new PowerEdge servers offer flexible platforms and innovative architectures that enable customers to tailor systems to meet their unique application and workload requirements including business computing, unified communications and collaboration, virtualization, and technical computing.