Dell PowerEdge 13G Server Family

Dell, Inc. unveiled its PowerEdge servers, designed to help customers address and optimize the evolving spectrum of application and workload requirements.

The PowerEdge 13th generation server portfolio features customer-inspired engineering built to optimize price performance for web, enterprise and hyperscale applications, and features advancements in storage, processing and memory technology coupled with systems management capabilities.

The new 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% of IT decision-makers report these factors as investment priorities for the next 12 months, according to the Future Ready IT survey, 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 organizations 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, VP and GM, 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 optimize new applications within their data centers.”

Next generation PowerEdge server portfolio
The first of the new Dell PowerEdge servers includes the PowerEdge R730xd, and R630 rack servers, the M630 blade server, and the T630 tower server, which are built with 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.

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% of IT decision-makers have been negatively affected by performance issues when running applications requiring fast access to data.

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 PowerEdge R630 can deliver customers up to 2.4 times the IO/s in the same amount of space as 2.5-inch SSDs.

The PowerEdge R730xd provides up to 100TB of storage for workloads such as Exchange, where it also delivers up to a 50% increase in mailbox size over previous generation servers.

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.
Zone large datasets by doubling the RAID performance with optional dual PERC9 controllers.
Support software defined storage and optimized data placement by providing hybrid storage configurations within the compute node that enable tiering capabilities.

Dell also has introduced DAS offerings specifically developed for the new PowerEdge servers. The Dell Storage MD1400 and MD1420 maximize-server-capacity-using-the-next-generation-direct-attached-storage offer affordable storage expansion, double the bandwidth and improved performance compared to the previous generation, data security with self-encrypting-drives, and seamless data management between the server and storage enclosure.

Enhancements make systems management easier
60% of IT managers (ITDMs) polled in the Future Ready IT survey say they are prioritizing reductions in operational complexity and simplification of data center 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 center situations from any hand-held device 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), to enable its customers’ mobile workforce by requiring up to 84% 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, 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%.

Empowering workloads for any scale
With more than 60% 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 centers must support a diverse and broad set of workloads and applications. New PowerEdge servers offer flexible platforms and architectures that enable customers to tailor systems to meet their application and workload requirements including business computing, unified communications and collaboration, virtualization, and technical computing.

“Businesses are in the midst of facing disruptive forces such as hybrid cloud computing, mobility, big data and software defined data centers while balancing initiatives that deliver exponential enhancements towards IT operational efficiency. Dell’s new PowerEdge servers help instill confidence with IT decision makers as they invest in a broad spectrum of infrastructure to efficiently run current workloads, embrace application modernization and successfully navigate emerging architectural designs,” said Mark Bowker, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group.

“IT organizations are facing a growing challenge to balance innovation with the need to deliver applications faster and more efficiently, all while outpacing increasing business performance and data demands. Microsoft is working closely with Dell to deliver validated solutions on PowerEdge 13th generation servers that enable self-service capabilities and deliver all the benefits and agility of cloud computing on premise while providing consistency and mobility with Service Provider Clouds and Microsoft Azure,” said Bill Laing, CVP, cloud and Enterprise, Microsoft Corp.

“As customers look for new ways to address workload requirements, Intel and Dell continue our successful history of collaboration on server and microprocessor designs built for the next generation of IT. The Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v3 family offers leading performance and breakthrough I/O capabilities to power Dell’s new PowerEdge servers and enable blazing storage speeds, enhanced server management and the versatility to run traditional and emerging business applications. We look forward to working with Dell to provide our mutual customers with optimized solutions for their evolving data center challenges in the digital services era,” said Shannon Poulin, VP, data center group, Intel Corp.

“With the next generation of PowerEdge servers, Dell is the first vendor to unleash the potential for Software-Defined Storage. The variety of drive options and sizes with lots of SSD types makes it a good choice for VMware deployments and Hadoop implementations. We saw an immediate boost of up to 100% in IO/s,” said Pavel Soukup, head of IT, AVG Technologies.

“As a cloud provider, TCO and energy efficiency of our servers are top priorities. We are impressed with the next generation of Dell servers, which bring energy efficiency to a new level, utilizing new technologies like Fresh Air 2.0 and iDRAC 8 with power capping and Intel Xeon E5v3 processors, all bundled with OpenManage Power Center Manager. The new OpenManage Power Center Manager will allow us to manage not just Dell hardware, but also other 3rd party equipment that we host in our data centers,” said Martin Zidek, CTO, Master Internet.

“ScaleMatrix relies on the Software-Defined Storage solutions from Dell and Nexenta to meet the demanding and ever growing needs of our customers. Their integrated solution gives us flexibility, customizability and the lowest TCO … both in CAPEX and OPEX. We are always looking at ways to improve storage performance and throughput while decreasing latency, and Dell’s new 13G servers with NexentaStor exceeded our expectations. We look forward to seamlessly integrating Dell’s 13G servers into both our storage and compute environments,” said Chris Orlando, co-founder, ScaleMatrix, Inc.

The new Dell PowerEdge servers began shipping on Sept 8, 2014.