Dell blades slash data centre power consumption

Dell recently set a new standard for data centre energy efficiency and flexibility with the PowerEdge M-Series blade solution.

The PowerEdge M-Series was designed from the ground up using Dell Energy Smart technologies, resulting in 30 industry patents, to help customers simplify information technology and better address mounting environmental challenges in their data centres.

"Blade offerings have been long on promises and short on helping customers address the growing costs and complexity in their data centres," said Doug Downing, enterprise brand manager of Dell South Africa.

"The PowerEdge M-Series delivers on those promises with unmatched energy efficiency, flexibility and manageability. It enables customers to achieve the compute performance they need while lowering their overall power consumption and reducing data centre complexity and server sprawl."

The PowerEdge M-Series consumes up to 19% less power and achieves up to 25% better performance per watt than the HP BladeSystem c-Class. Compared to the IBM BladeCenter H, the M-Series consumes 12% less energy and achieves up to 28% better performance per watt. Built on Dell's Energy Smart technologies, the PowerEdge M-Series enables businesses to save on power and cooling costs while increasing server capacity. The M-Series also provides lead-free configurations, delivering a "green IT" solution that further helps customers minimise their environmental impact.

The PowerEdge M1000e, a 10U-sized enclosure, supports 16 blade servers. It is optimised for Dell's PowerEdge M600 and M605 blade servers and supports up to two quad-core Intel Xeon and quad-core AMD Opteron processors, respectively. The M600 and M605 blade servers are 60% more dense than standard Dell 1U servers, helping customers to better address data centre space constraints.

Additionally, Dell's PowerEdge M1000e delivers one of the industry's most advanced connectivity options designed to provide flexible, low total cost of ownership choices for almost any size data centre, including:

* An upgradeable Ethernet blade switch, the Layer 3 Dell PowerConnect M6220, with four 1Gb ports and optional upgradeable ports for stacking or 10Gb;
* Three Cisco Ethernet switch options, enabling customers to choose between a switch with all 1Gb ports, 1Gb ports plus stacking ports or a combination of 1Gb and 10Gb plus stacking. An Infiniband switch option from Cisco also will be available;
* Two Brocade FC4 Fibre Channel connectivity options, allowing customers to choose between a standard FC4 switch or a low cost port aggregator that provides simplified configuration and interoperability into almost any SAN fabric;
* FC4 Host Business Adaptors from QLogic and Emulex, as well as an Infiniband mezzanine card from Mellanox; and
* Fibre Channel and Ethernet Pass Through options for customers with an existing switch infrastructure, including an Ethernet pass-through module that can run at 10/100/1000Mb per second.

Dell's PowerEdge M-Series incorporates FlexIO switch technology, making it the only blade solution providing snap-in scalability all the way down to the switch interconnects, helping to protect and maximise a customer's server investment by eliminating the need for wasteful "rip-and-replace" upgrades.

With Flex IO switch technology, M-Series customers can get the flexibility they need to efficiently design a networked blade environment that best meets their infrastructure requirements today, and easily and cost-effectively add or modify network stacking and uplink capabilities as technology or business needs change.

Dell PowerEdge M-Series is the ideal platform for virtualisation and enables customers to consolidate their data centre operations and improve utilisation without sacrificing performance. The ability to provision virtual machines and physical machines in the same blade server chassis simplifies deployment and management of a virtualised environment.

Dell's OpenManage systems management suite available with the PowerEdge M-Series simplifies IT with easy-to-use yet powerful management tools that help reduce the cost and complexity of managing computing resources. OpenManage provides customers with a more holistic view and greater understanding of their data centre infrastructures, enabling timely, more informed IT management decisions.

Dell provides expanded management features in the M-Series at no additional cost, including:

* Centralised chassis management controllers that provide redundant, secure access paths for IT administrators to manage multiple enclosures and blades from a single console;
* Dynamic power management enabling administrators to set high/low power thresholds to help ensure blades operate within their defined power envelope;
* Real-time reporting for enclosure and blade power consumption, and the ability to prioritise blade slots for power to provide optimal control over power resources; and
* Integrated KVM (keyboard/video/mouse), allowing for easy set-up, deployment and seamless integration into an existing KVM infrastructure.