Dell's new 12th generation PowerEdge servers extend performance, efficiency gains to scale-out and mainstream customers

Dell has announced additions to the PowerEdge portfolio with new blade, rack and tower servers designed to deliver value and performance in demanding enterprise and mainstream environments. The new blade servers offer strong performance gains and improved efficiencies from the shared power, cooling and network infrastructure, and professional IT services. The new tower and rack servers are built to enhance customer IT infrastructures with enterprise-class capabilities and tailored chassis designs for small and midsize businesses.

Dell introduced industry-leading innovations in the PowerEdge 12th generation servers based on input gathered from more than 7 700 customer interactions in 17 countries across four continents. The company was the first to ship servers based on the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family, with the first wave of PowerEdge 12th generation servers in March 2012.

The new PowerEdge rack, tower and blade servers expand on Dell's commitment to deliver end-to-end solutions optimised for maximum throughput from storage to switch to server to blade enclosure. With these new PowerEdge servers, customers can experience energy efficiency, scalable storage, networking and security features at an unprecedented price for performance. The new PowerEdge rack, tower and blade servers include Intel Xeon processor E5-2400 and Intel Xeon processor E5-4600 product families.

The PowerEdge R820 is the world's first 4-socket, 2U server with Intel Xeon E5 product family processors. Customers using 4-socket 4U servers can now save computing space by replacing one HP Proliant DL580 with two Dell PowerEdge R820 servers, for up to 24 more processing cores, 1TB more memory capacity and three times the internal storage density. In addition, the PowerEdge R820 offers an option for four front-accessible, hot-swappable Dell Express Flash PCIe SSDs.

The PowerEdge M420 is the world's only quarter height 2-socket blade server, offering extreme computational density, performance and efficiency. The PowerEdge M1000e, the only chassis in the world with the thermal engineering to support individually serviceable, enterprise-class, quarter-height blade servers, holds up to 32 PowerEdge M420s. Customers can stretch their infrastructure budget farther by doubling the nodes per chassis with the greatest 2-socket density server on the planet in the PowerEdge M420 and the Dell Force10 MXL 10 blade switch. The PowerEdge M420 is designed to adhere to stringent government requirements while providing world class density with no compromise to data centre availability and performance.

Dell offers robust anytime, anywhere systems management of platforms and infrastructure to simplify operations throughout the server life cycle, with key innovations.

Dell also significantly improved cooling while increasing density in the PowerEdge M820, which is the first 4-socket blade server capable of Fresh Air configuration and allows customers to deploy highly dense solutions while significantly decreasing cooling costs.

The PowerEdge 12th generation servers are the world's only full generation of rack and tower servers to all offer Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller 7 (iDRAC7) with Lifecycle Controller 2.0 for deploying, updating, maintaining and monitoring their systems without a software management agent, regardless of operating system.

In addition, industry-leading Chassis Management Controller (CMC) has been updated to support up to 288 independently serviceable blade nodes, all from a single console, using a single IP address.

Large and small businesses are continuously challenged to scale appropriately; balancing the risks of either significantly overpaying for equipment they do not use, or being caught with underpowered equipment and losing business cycles. The new PowerEdge 12th generation servers can provide customers with increased application performance, availability and scalability, and key innovations, including:

* The PowerEdge M820 blade servers are loaded with extra memory to give customers headroom to grow in the future.
* With more processor cores, larger memory capacity and greater I/O bandwidth than previous generations, the R520, R420 and R320 rack servers, and the T420 and T320 tower servers can provide higher performance to small and medium business users as well as departments and remote offices of large enterprises and organisations, enabling them to deliver real results faster.
* Small and midsized businesses can deploy new levels of computational density via the PowerEdge M420 with 32 powerful nodes in just 10U of rack space without trading off redundancy by providing hot-swappable, fault tolerant HHDs as well as Failsafe Hypervisors.

Downtime and data loss determine business revenue and performance as companies are increasingly dependent on cloud-based applications, virtualised solutions, and high performance computing.

Businesses must now deliver IT solutions that not only ensure redundancy and maximise uptime, but can scale to address increased demand while maintaining cost efficiency. Customers running PowerEdge 12th generation servers can now benefit from continual access to the applications that drive the business, with innovations, including:

* The new PowerEdge M420, M520 and M820 blade servers offer performance and efficiency improvements, and leading features including hardware RAID and hot-swappable hard drives.
* The world's first full product family portfolio to servers to offer enterprise-class RAS features for redundancy and fault-tolerance, memory mirroring, memory sparing, hot plug hard drives and redundant power supplies. This provides IT administrators with continuity and consistency across their entire server infrastructure from the data centre to remote and mobile locations.
* The industry's first server family portfolio to all offer Redundant Failsafe SD Hypervisors across the entire family, so customers can take advantage of server virtualisation with built-in redundancy and fault tolerance.

Quotes:

“Dell is experiencing exceptional demand for the first wave of PowerEdge 12th generation servers from customers around the globe looking to power their most demanding workload requirements. We are now pleased to introduce a second wave of 12th generation servers that delivers exceptional value for performance and continues our successful integration of customer feedback and design requirements. Dell is enabling customers to deliver results faster through our tight integration of Dell servers, storage, networking, client and services that take advantage of Dell's latest innovations resulting from both R&D and key acquisitions of IP.” - Kobus De Beer, Enterprise Brand Manager, Dell South Africa

“Dell's 12th Generation PowerEdge servers take advantage of the Intel Xeon processor E5 family's leadership performance and breakthrough I/O capabilities to offer optimised solutions for customers' diverse workloads,” said Boyd Davis, VP & GM of Intel's Datacenter Infrastructure Group. “By leveraging the features of new Xeon processors, Dell's new servers provide the flexibility, value and performance that businesses demand in a market that is ever less tolerant of compromise. 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.”

“Maximising performance per watt is critical for increasing the amount of high-performance computing (HPC) resources we can provide from our existing datacentres. In our testing, the Dell PowerEdge R820 server with the Intel Xeon processor E5 family consumed about the same power per processor as previous-generation servers while enabling us to do more work. By building a new cluster with these servers, we can offer greater compute resources to researchers while staying within the power limits of our data centre.” - Michael Fenn, High-Performance Computing Systems Administrator, Penn State University

Availability:

The PowerEdge servers will be distributed through Drive Control and Tarsus in South Africa.

Additional information:

PowerEdge 12th generation wave 2 servers:

PowerEdge M820 blade server is optimised for maximum scalability, throughput and computational capability in virtualised applications, high-performance computing and scale-out environments.

PowerEdge M520 blade server can deliver exceptional power efficiency and extraordinary price for performance for mainstream business applications.

PowerEdge M420 blade server can deliver maximum node density or maximum performance per chassis, with no compromise to availability PowerEdge R320 1-socket, 1U delivers no-compromise RAS features along with powerful performance and expandability for web hosting and serving.

PowerEdge R820 rack server optimised for dense virtualisation and scalable database applications.

PowerEdge R520 2-socket, 2U rack server can deliver powerful performance to drive mid-tier business applications and mainstream virtualisation.

PowerEdge R420 2-socket, 1U rack server can deliver double-down density, powerful performance and scalability for compute-intense applications, while keeping cool with Fresh Air.

PowerEdge R320 1-socket, 1u rack server can deliver no-compromise RAS features along with powerful performance and expandability for web hosting and serving.

PowerEdge T420 2-socket tower server can deliver performance, capacity and high availability features to drive businesses and organisations forward.

PowerEdge T320 1-socket tower server can deliver performance and room for growth along with enterprise-class RAS features to help make businesses and organisations more productive and effective.

Innovations that deliver results faster: Extending the benefits of 12G by Forrest Norrod.

Dell announced the industry's first 40GbE enabled blade server switch on 24 April 2012.

Dell introduced first wave of PowerEdge 12th generation servers on 6 March 2012.