Dell has expanded its PowerEdge portfolio with nine new blade, rack and tower servers designed to deliver value and performance in demanding enterprise and mainstream environments. 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 company has taken input gathered from more than 7,700 customer interactions in 17 countries into account during the development process.
The new line-up includes the world’s first four-socket, 2U server with Intel Xeon E5 product family processors, the PowerEdge R820, which offers an option for four front-accessible, hot-swappable Dell Express Flash PCIe SSDs. In another first, the PowerEdge M420 is the only quarter height two-socket blade server, offering computational density, performance and efficiency, while the PowerEdge M1000e is the only chassis with the thermal engineering to support individually serviceable, enterprise-class, quarter-height blade servers. It holds up to 32 PowerEdge M420s. The PowerEdge M420 is designed to adhere to stringent government requirements, while providing what the company describes as world-class density with no compromise to datacentre availability and performance.
The PowerEdge 12th generation servers are the 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, the 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. The new PowerEdge rack, tower and blade servers include Intel Xeon processor E5-2400 and Intel Xeon processor E5-4600 product families.
‘Maximising performance per watt is critical for increasing the amount of high-performance computing (HPC) resources we can provide from our existing datacentres,’ commented Michael Fenn, high-performance computing systems administrator at Penn State University, US. ‘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 datacentre.’
The PowerEdge R820 server will begin shipping immediately. The R520, R420, R320, M520 and M420 will be available later this month, and the M820, T420 and T320 will ship in the summer.
