Dell's Revamped New Data Center Solutions

Technology provider Dell has unveiled new technology, services, management tools and business ready solutions including open and modular technologies to increase flexibility, and pre-configured business-ready bundles.

With the combination of next-generation storage platforms and intelligent infrastructure compute models becoming increasingly important, according to Dell's Wednesday announcement, Dell has unveiled new EqualLogic storage products, PowerConnect networking solutions and PowerEdge blade servers, all built on industry-standards. It has also introduced new Dell Storage, Virtualization and Support Services, drive organizational and application agility to help IT departments shift their focus from basic maintenance to innovation.

"Organizations benefit from Dell's approach to open, capable and affordable technologies that preserve choice and free up budgets for innovation and today we are introducing several new product and solution offerings to reinforce that direction," Dell Enterprise Product Group senior vice president Brad Anderson said in a statement. "With new solutions for virtualization management, new innovations in our server and storage product lines and expanded service offerings our customers can utilize Dell for the benefits of a converged architecture – dynamic workload allocation, faster time to deployment, seamless management – but they don't want to be locked into a closed technology stack."

To help customers more quickly deploy fully integrated virtualization-ready data center solutions, Dell today introduced six new Business Ready Configurations, which help customers reduce the complexity and trial and error involved in deploying virtualization projects by bringing together best-of-breed server, storage, networking, and virtualization technologies in pre-configured and validated bundles to ensure fast deployments.

Also, advancements in the Dell EqualLogic software architecture dramatically improve the performance and scalability of EqualLogic storage arrays at no additional cost to new or existing EqualLogic customers. EqualLogic 5.0 firmware, for instance, helps VMware infrastructures dramatically reduce SAN network traffic for the copy process by more than 95 percent, and CPU utilization for the copy process by more than 75 percent.

EqualLogic 5.0 enhances the new Dell EqualLogic PS6000XVS and PS6010XVS storage arrays, which combine the advantages of SAS and SSD drives in a single enclosure to improve density and performance. New Dell PowerVault MD3200 and PowerVault MD3200i storage arrays are suitable for small and medium-sized businesses looking for an affordable, high-performance virtualization platform.

Dell has also introduced two new PowerEdge blades and one rack server designed to improve virtualization performance, flexibility and power efficiency. The PowerEdge M710HD blade server is designed and optimized for virtual workloads and offers users tremendous I/O flexibility, high memory density, and robust Intel Xeon processing power. It is one of few high density, memory optimized blade servers supporting failsafe redundant embedded hypervisors and hot-swappable SAS or SSD drive options.

The PowerEdge M610x blade provides database acceleration and expanded graphics capabilities by integrating powerful PCIe solutions like NVIDIA's new Tesla "Fermi" class GPGPUs or Fusion-IO's ioDrive Duo. NVIDIA Tesla 20-series GPGPUs can produce the computational horsepower of an equivalent non-GPGPU quad-core CPU clusters at approximately a tenth the cost using about twentieth the power.

The AMD-based 2U PowerEdge R715 rack server balances 24 processing cores with a large memory footprint, and is ideal for virtualization, workload consolidation and small scale database and network infrastructure deployments, with its attractive balance between price and performance.

Dell also announced the PowerConnect-J product series, a result of Dell's OEM agreement with Juniper. The PowerConnect J-Series EX8200 family provides a new scalable chassis solution for high performance switching and routing in data center and cloud environments. The PowerConnect J-Series EX4200 family of switches leverages Virtual Chassis technology to help smaller data center and branch office environments stack and manage up to ten EX4200 switches as a single device. Finally, the PowerConnect J-Series SRX family of Service Gateway products target a broad range of security needs including content security, access control and state-of-the-art firewall and virtual private network technology.

Based on Dell's OEM agreement with Brocade, the launch of PowerConnect B-Series RX-16 extends Dell's line of switches PowerConnect B-RX with a 16-slot, modular chassis, delivering performance and scalability for demanding networks with 10GbE requirements.

These new Dell products, as well as the company's storage, virtualization and support services, promise the technology and the expertise required to reduce the expense and time required to build, manage and maintain an efficient data center.