Dell Introduces Complete Refresh of PowerEdge Servers with Energy Efficient Designs and Embedded Systems Management

Dell today introduced five new blade, rack and tower PowerEdge servers based on the new Intel Xeon 5500 Series processors. Dell designed its 11th generation of servers with input from IT professionals worldwide to help companies do more with less by simplifying data center operations, improving performance and, energy efficiency and lowering total cost of ownership.

• Five new blade, rack and tower servers with latest Intel Xeon 5500 series processors are designed for power efficiency and leading virtualization performance
• Industry’s first and only embedded systems management eliminates data center complexity with Dell Unified Server Configurator powered by Lifecycle Controller
• Dell ProManage offers ImageDirect for servers to automate deployment and help save IT staff time

The new Dell PowerEdge servers are available today on dell/PowerEdge starting at $1,599 or through any of Dell’s more than 40,000 Global PartnerDirect Channel Partners.

The News:

The new Dell PowerEdge servers include the M610 and M710 blade servers for the M1000e chassis, the R710 and R610 rack servers and the T610 tower server. Dell will roll-out PowerEdge additions to its two-socket portfolio – the T710, R410 and T410 – in the coming months.

The latest PowerEdge servers help companies enhance IT efficiency with:

• Embedded Systems Management: Dell Unified Server Configurator powered by LifeCycle Controller is embedded on 11th generation PowerEdge servers. This new systems management technology radically simplifies many common IT processes such as deployment, diagnostics, update, and configuration. Unified Server Configurator has “Instant On” integrated manageability with zero media deployment through a single access point. The Dell PowerEdge R710 server is 43 percent faster than the HP ProLiant DL385 G5p at pre-Operating System server configuration.
• Power and Thermal Efficiency: Dell 11th generation PowerEdge servers are available with Energy Smart technologies that are designed to reduce power consumption while increasing performance capacity. Enhancements include efficient power supply units optimized for system requirements, improved system-level design efficiency, policy-driven power and thermal management and highly efficient standards-based Energy Smart components.

Dell PowerEdge servers with Energy Smart design architecture can save customers up to 48 Watts in energy consumption compared to previous generation PowerEdge over the lifecycle of the product. Each Dell PowerEdge server can save customers $200 in energy cost over the expected lifecycle of the product.

Dell PowerEdge 11th generation servers expect to achieve the industry’s highest performance per watt, according to SPECpower_ssj2008 results to be published on March 30, 2009.

The Dell PowerEdge M710 server and Dell EqualLogic storage has a 47.5 percent performance-per-watt advantage over competitor’s blade server and storage.

Virtualization Performance: Featuring Intel’s Nehalem-based architecture, embedded hypervisors, up to 125 percent increased memory footprint and more integrated I/O, PowerEdge 11th generation servers offer better overall system performance and virtual machine per server capacity compared to previous generations. Dell provides a smart path to virtualization with the choice of hypervisor from VMware, Citrix and Microsoft.

The Dell PowerEdge R710 server and Dell EqualLogic storage supported 25 percent more Microsoft Exchange 2007 virtual machines than a competitor’s rack server and storage.

Inspired Design: Dell PowerEdge servers have system and image commonality across platforms to enable lower deployment and management costs. The logical layout of components and power supply placement allows for straight forward installation and redeployment. The new PowerEdge servers have inspired design enhancements including all steel construction cable management arm, new metal hard drive carriers, single pull fan module and quick release rack latching. The servers allow unprecedented system management from the aisle with multi-layer LCD and KVM access. The industrial design of the PowerEdge R610 and R710 was recognized as winners of the 2009 iF Germany Product Design Award.

Lower total cost of ownership: In TCO comparisons by rack, by chassis and by blade, the Dell PowerEdge M710 blade solution had a lower TCO and yielded significant cost savings over the HP ProLiant BL685c G5 blade solution. The Dell M710 had 40% lower TCO per chassis over 3 years compared to HP ProLiant BL685c G5 blade solution.

System performance: Dell 11th generation PowerEdge servers have achieved up to 50 percent increase in performance over previous generation servers allowing companies to run more compute intensive databases and applications more efficiently.

Image Management Service for PowerEdge Servers

• To help simplify image management for the new 11th generation servers, Dell will now offer ImageDirect, an online solution that enables organizations to securely create, deploy and manage virtual and physical images on new Dell servers. Provisioning servers with ImageDirect can save IT staff time. Companies can now create and manage server images online and have them factory-installed, enabling image consistency and quality while eliminating time consuming on-premise manual configuration and reducing deployment and IT staff time. Companies can rapidly stabilize new servers into their production environment with ready to deploy optimized configurations and minimize unwanted drift from desired configuration states at the time of deployment.
• With Dell ProConsult Dell analyzes all aspects of a customer’s data center needs, and provides them with specific actions to simplify and help save costs in their data center through virtualization of servers and storage and consolidation of data centers. Dell analyzes their power and cooling capacity and practices to find inefficiencies, and provides recommendations for getting the most out of their hidden data center. New systems management consulting [link] and tools can improve data center operations from server provisioning and maintenance to availability monitoring and service-level management through asset retirement.

Quotes:

“CEOs don’t wake up in the middle of the night worrying about what the servers in their data center are doing, and they shouldn’t have to. Dell is creating technology that greatly simplifies IT throughout its entire lifecycle to make our customers more efficient. The new Dell 11th generation PowerEdge servers were designed to lead the industry in price/performance, virtualization and power/thermal efficiency to reduce complexity and cost and let our customers focus on creating business value.” -- Brad Anderson, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Product Group, Dell.

“Getting maximum utilization of existing datacenters can drive constraints placed by overall infrastructure power and cooling demands, limiting business agility. Dell‘s 11th generation PowerEdge servers with the new Intel Xeon processor 5500 series give companies unprecedented performance and intelligent power consumption that can dynamically adapt to application workloads and business demands. With this refresh, customers can enhance business agility, extend the life of their data centers, and have additional room for growth.” --Kirk Skaugen, Vice President and General Manager, Server Platforms Group, Intel

“The Dell PowerEdge R610 server and PowerEdge M610 blade server will help us reduce overall power consumption and get the most out of what we do use. These systems give us five times the processing capacity for the same amount of power as servers we acquired only three years ago.” -- Gary Jung, Manager, Scientific Cluster Support Group, IT division, UC Berkeley Laboratory

“The sheer volume of transactions we need to process every day, makes it necessary that our servers are highly reliable and optimized for high performance computing. Dell's new 11th generation PowerEdge servers meet our performance goals, are highly scalable and easier to manage. It made it an easy choice for our data center.”-- Anna Ewing, Chief Information Officer at NASDAQ OMX.