Johannesburg, 12 Mar 2012
Dell today announced a portfolio of blade, rack and tower PowerEdge servers optimised for use in demanding enterprise environments. As the only one of the top five server vendors to grow server revenues in Q4 2011 with 9.7 percent year-over-year revenue growth, Dell continues to innovate to deliver features that are industry firsts and make the PowerEdge 12th-generation servers the company's highest performing, most manageable servers ever. With this new server series, customers ranging from small businesses to hyper-scale data centres can help maximise efficiency by streamlining and automating operations, help achieve better business application performance and business continuity.
“Dell designed the new PowerEdge servers with input gathered from more than 7 700 customer interactions in 17 countries across four continents,” said Kobus de Beer, Enterprise Brand Manager at Dell South Africa.
“Our customers told us that they need end-to-end solutions to handle the complex workload problems they face every day. As such, we built our new generation of servers, systems management and workload solutions to address the needs of business end-users who require maximum performance to run mission-critical applications and IT departments that demand more efficient, secure and reliable operations.”
PowerEdge 12th-generation server portfolio
The new PowerEdge R820, R720, R720xd and R620 rack servers, the M620 blade server, the T620 tower server and C6220, based on a shared Dell infrastructure server built on the Intel Xeon processor E5 product family, are the foundation of a complete, flexible IT solution including Dell's extensive portfolio of storage, networking and client components and professional IT services.
The next-generation PowerEdge servers, along with systems management and workload solutions, are designed to deliver performance and management gains to effectively power the most demanding applications, including collaboration, IT and Web infrastructure, high-performance computing, decision support and business processing.
Maximise efficiency
Dell updated the industry's first embedded systems management tools, the Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller 6 (iDRAC6), with Lifecycle Controller 1.0, which shipped in more than 3.5 million 11th-generation PowerEdge servers since its introduction in 2009, according to IDC. Now the second-generation, iDRAC7 with Lifecycle Controller 2.0, enables customers to uniformly manage the deployment, updating, monitoring and maintenance of the server life cycle. New capabilities include:
* Reclaim time with agent-free monitoring of over 400 sensors, including memory, RAID, storage and network devices, in multi-vendor operating system and hypervisor environments without installing software agents or drivers, which can save up to $2.5 million in server maintenance.
* Deploy servers quickly with new bare-metal deployment and provisioning that requires up to 86% less engineer time and up to 86% fewer manual steps.
* Help improve productivity with the enhanced Lifecycle Controller Log - significant improvements using Dell's 11th-generation embedded server management features saved Virtacore up to 43 days of system administrator time per year.
* Remotely enable and configure an extensive selection of network components delivered with PowerEdge 12th-generation servers.
* Customise solutions with a new library of more than 65 scripts leveraging industry standard protocols.
* Dell and partners Microsoft, VMware and BMC have integrated iDRAC7 with Lifecycle Controller 2.0 with their systems management frameworks to provide mutual customers the benefits of automated one-to-many embedded management features while preserving their existing IT investments and processes.
Dell also announced OpenManage Essentials, a new management console, which monitors the health of Dell servers, storage and switches. By interfacing with the Dell KACE K1000 Management Appliance, OpenManage Essentials sends user-defined server, storage and network health status alerts to the K1000 service desk.
The new PowerEdge 12th-generation servers are designed to maximise infrastructure efficiency, with innovations including:
* Increase performance per watt up to 101 times over Dell servers 10 years ago, enabling large data centres to save up to $1.8 million per year on server power alone.
* An expanded Fresh Air offering for all PowerEdge 12th-generation servers, based on customer feedback. Operate up to the highest excursion temperature (113^0F/45^0C) warranteed in mainstream servers in the industry and save up to an estimated $3 000 000 in capital savings.
* Server fans in the R720 and T620 models that use less energy to cool the system than it takes to power a nightlight.
* OpenManage Power Center - leveraging Node Manager developed by Dell and Intel - controls and optimises energy usage at the server, rack, row and room level from a single interface.
* The industry's first power supply unit to be awarded the highest level of energy efficiency, the Titanium certification, based on independent testing by 80 PLUS.
* The ability to pack in up to 300% more SQL Virtual Machines per rack for higher data centre utilisation compared to previous generation Dell servers.
* The unique Select Network Adapter portfolio to protect investments with a choice of networking I/O, connection speed - including 10GbE, across the portfolio - and vendor, without using a valuable PCI slot all deeply integrated with iDRAC7 with Lifecycle Controller 2.0.
* New all-in-one appliances built on PowerEdge 12th-generation servers. Dell vStart for Dell Private Cloud, including Dell VIS Creator software, enables IT and business end-users to accelerate application and IT service delivery. The Dell Quickstart Data Warehouse Appliance, which is based on the new Dell PowerEdge servers, will be the first data warehouse appliance available on Microsoft SQL Server 2012, and will help mid-market and departmental users easily organise, access and analyse data, enabling them to make more informed decisions.
Achieve more
The PowerEdge 12th-generation servers enable customers to increase application performance, availability and scalability, with new capabilities that:
* Improve responsiveness and provide fast customer insights, delivering up to 18% more Microsoft SQL Server transactions per second than HDD storage, with new industry-leading technologies like Dell Express Flash, the first server design with front accessible, hot swappable PCIe solid state disks.
* Deliver up to three times the number of mailboxes with the capacity and capability for Microsoft Exchange with up to two times more message processing with Scalable Storage.
* Accelerate Oracle database applications with up to 86% reduction in transaction response time performance with Dell Compellent Data Progression Automated Tiered Storage feature.
* Consolidate Oracle RAC database workloads at a rate of up to 8:1, with up to 84% increase in power savings.
Ensure business continuity
Customers running PowerEdge 12th-generation servers can count on continual access to the IT services that power the business, with new features that:
* Maximise security by authenticating the integrity of updates using digitally signed firmware, safeguarding access to passwords and certificates with iDRAC Credential Vault, and using Data Wipe to remove critical data from retired or repurposed servers.
* Ensure redundancy and maximise uptime with an array of reliability, availability and serviceability features including hot swappable fans, disks and spare power supplies, plus unique capabilities such as Failsafe Hypervisor and Memory Page Retire.
Quotes:
“Today's IT organisations are balancing pressures to become more energy efficient and stretch existing manpower further, while supporting ever increasing amounts of data. Customers are looking to make server hardware investments that deliver the best of management and performance. The 12th-generation PowerEdge servers build on Dell's early lead in introducing embedded systems management into x86 servers with new features designed to streamline and automate data centre operations.” - Matt Eastwood, Group Vice-President, Enterprise Platform Research, IDC.
“Dell's PowerEdge 12th-generation servers take advantage of the Intel Xeon processor E5 family's leadership performance and breakthrough I/O capabilities to offer optimised solutions for customers' most important workloads. In small-scale deployments, private clouds and enterprise data centres, customers will also benefit from key innovations such as Dell OpenManage Power Center, which is built on top of Intel's Node Manager solution for monitoring and implementing policies for greater energy efficiency.” - Boyd Davis, VP & GM of Intel's Datacenter Infrastructure Group.
Additional information:
New servers:
* PowerEdge R820 rack server for dense virtualisation and scalable database applications
* PowerEdge R720xd rack server, optimised for collaboration
* PowerEdge C6220 with optimised performance-focused shared infrastructure
* PowerEdge R720 rack server for demanding workloads, with server fans that cool with less power than it takes to runs a nightlight
* PowerEdge R620 rack server packing in up to 300% more SQL virtual machines per rack
* PowerEdge T620 rackable tower server
Other news:
* Dell introduces the industry's first power supply unit to achieve the coveted Titanium certification for the highest level of energy efficiency
* Dell unveils the industry's first QR codes on servers for easy access to documentation optimised for mobile devices
* Overview of Dell's Enterprise Solutions that Help Customers Deliver Results Faster
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