Dell boosts PowerEdge portfolio at Dell Solutions Tour 2015

Source: Dell. The PowerEdge R930 server.

Dell has expanded the top end of its 13th generation PowerEdge servers with the PowerEdge R930, a server specifically designed for the most demanding enterprise applications such as in-memory databases, customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP). Once the domain of Unix systems, these enterprise applications are increasingly shifting to x86 platforms for increased innovation, additional capabilities and lower total cost of ownership.

The global x86 server market has grown more than 600% since Dell first introduced the PowerEdge portfolio roughly 20 years ago, while the non-x86 market has shrunk 70% percent between 2000 and 2013. Even with the declines, the non-x86 market presents a US$9.1 billion addressable market in 2015¹. With the PowerEdge R930, along with Dell software and services, many of these non-x86 customers can migrate from Unix to Linux with ease and move to a more innovative, future-ready data centre. 

In 1995, 5% of the company’s revenue came from server sales and Dell had just 3% market share, ranking seventh in server unit shipments². Dell currently has 21% unit share, is the only top-three server vendor to gain worldwide unit share year over year³, and is growing its server portfolio at more than two times the pace of the industry⁴ with innovations such as PowerEdge FX.

"As our business continued to grow, our previous system was getting slow, hard to manage and unreliable," said Gan Desheng, Subdivision Manager, Information Management, Ameco Beijing, which specialises in aircraft maintenance and engineering. 

"We were looking for a new system to keep up with our business needs and decided to migrate from RISC to x86 servers. By moving from IBM’s P-series UNIX systems to Dell’s PowerEdge R9-series servers we were able to reduce our total cost of ownership by nearly 50%, achieve 99.99% system availability and improve our performance of systems running the SAP ERP application by 3.5 times." 

The PowerEdge R930 rack server can optimise transactions and operations while reducing latency. It enables customers to:

· Scale workloads by leveraging storage expansion capabilities and a large memory footprint. The PowerEdge R930 features the upcoming Intel Xeon processor E7-8800/4800 v3 product families, 24 internal hard drives and support for up to eight high performance PowerEdge Express Flash NVMe PCIe SSDs.

Dell PowerEdge Express Flash NVMe PCIe SSDs deliver front loading, hot pluggable 2.5" devices, providing up to 10 times more input /output operations per second (IOPS) over traditional SSDs⁵. Customers can also leverage a mix of HDDs and SAS SSDs with SanDisk DAS Cache to reduce the price by 23% compared to an all-SSD configuration while improving performance by as much as nine times compared to an all-HDD configuration⁶.

· Protect mission-critical and data-intensive applications with built-in reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) features, such as Dell’s exclusive Fault Resilient Memory.

· Reduce configuration time by up to 99% and reduce time on manual inventory by up to 91%⁷. IT administrators can also automate more highly. They can also monitor and address data centre situations from a mobile device anywhere in the world with Dell’s recently updated OpenManage systems management portfolio.

The PowerEdge R930 will serve as the hardware foundation for appliances and integrated systems focused on popular software platforms such as Oracle 12c and SAP HANA, helping customers speed time-to-value and maximise IT resource efficiency. 

For customers who want to gain business insight in real-time by leveraging SAP HANA into their IT environment with little or no configuration, Dell offers Dell Engineered Solutions for SAP HANA. This appliance will be updated to include SAP HANA pre-integrated and preconfigured on Dell PowerEdge R930 servers to help customers deploy applications faster, scale up and down easier and better manage infrastructure and workload delivery.

The Dell Acceleration Appliance for Databases (DAAD) built with Dell PowerEdge R930 servers will accelerate any database infrastructure, and Dell Integrated Systems for Oracle Database is being updated with the PowerEdge R930. This pre-engineered, pre-configured and pre-racked combination of DAAD and the PowerEdge R930 servers will help customers migrate to and accelerate current Oracle 12c environments.

In addition to the PowerEdge R930 rack server, Dell is updating its PowerEdge VRTX and PowerEdge M1000e converged platforms, and introducing the PowerEdge FC830 and the PowerEdge M830 blade server as part of Dell’s 13th generation of PowerEdge servers.

The PowerEdge M830 and FC830 servers are designed to meet the performance needs for workloads in database, technical computing and virtualised environments while enabling the flexibility, scalability and manageability customers demand for the future-ready enterprise. 

The FC830 runs a wide range of database-driven, mission critical applications for midsize and large businesses. It is a full-width, half-height four-socket server block for the PowerEdge FX architecture that helps organisations quickly configure complete workloads using modular building blocks. A combination of performance and data access makes this server ideal for large-scale virtualisation or the database tier of high performance computing (HPC) environments. The PowerEdge M830 blade server is a full height, four-socket blade server version. 

Both the PowerEdge FC830 and PowerEdge M830 support the upcoming Intel Xeon processor E5-4600 v3 product family and include Dell’s systems management capabilities.

"The PowerEdge R930 certainly has the power, capacity and reliability required to meet most business needs. But what’s more important is Dell’s ecosystem approach to solving customers pain points, not just the hardware," said Dan Harrington, Research Director, 451 Research. 

"Customers are increasingly looking to purpose-built appliances that can be deployed quickly and reliably for applications such as SAP HANA. Dell’s high end x86 portfolio not only provides the solid hardware platform for this, but also the software and services ecosystem required to manage complex scenarios such as the ongoing industry migration from Unix to Linux. In addition to this, Dell’s long standing relationships with channel partners and key system integrators – such as Accenture, Deloitte and Atos – provides the right mix of capabilities to tackle those projects."

"Dell servers are consistently pushing the boundaries when it comes to accelerating application performance, powering workloads in any environment and simplifying systems management so that customers can focus on their business," said Mak Chin Wah, GM, Enterprise Solutions, Dell South Asia. 

"The PowerEdge R930, our powerhouse server, and our entire four-socket server portfolio are the latest examples of how we’re providing our customers with the technology they need to address the business needs of today and tomorrow." 

Source: Dell. The PowerEdge FX2 chassis.

Dell also announced new modules for the Dell PowerEdge FX converged architecture, which was introduced last November, to offer enterprises more flexibility to add or swap IT building blocks into a 2U converged infrastructure chassis. 

PowerEdge FX is designed with integrated management capabilities that allow customers to easily configure, manage and add capacity. Customers can choose the systems management style that best fits their needs – by managing servers individually like traditional rack servers, or managing collectively as many do with blade servers.

“With PowerEdge FX, Dell gives customers more freedom than ever to build the converged infrastructure they need to solve business needs of today and into the future,” said Mak. "By providing customers greater business agility and offering even more ways to optimise the building blocks of server, storage and networking to their workloads, we will continue to build on the great momentum we have seen to date with customers, partners and influencers.”

By combining the density and efficiencies of blade servers with the simplicity and cost advantages of rack-based systems, the PowerEdge FX architecture has enabled customers to address changing workload demands while providing high reliability, availability and serviceability. Customers such as a large e-commerce company in Asia purchased more than 10,000 FX servers over competitive solutions. More specifically:

Stack Overflow, an online community for programmers that allows users to exchange questions and answers to help with everyday programming needs, needed to update their existing data centre to control rack space and optimise performance for an increase in web traffic. The company decided to update their infrastructure with the latest solutions from Dell including the PowerEdge FX platform.

“By choosing to deploy Dell PowerEdge FX2 chassis with FC630s, along with Dell 13^th generation PowerEdge servers, we are able to start with a smaller form factor and pack a lot of power into a more compact solution,” said George Beech, Site Reliability Engineer, Stack Overflow. “We now have a flexible IT solution that allows us to add servers with different processors and memory sizes to maximise online performance and meet workload demands.”

Charles King, Principal Analyst, Pund-IT stated: "PowerEdge FX architecture could rewrite the book on converged design,” while a Forrester Research report by Infrastructure & Operations Analyst Richard Fichera states that the PowerEdge FX architecture “is a harbinger of the likely future direction of mainstream enterprise servers…it will also prove to be a wakeup call for its competitors⁸.”

The new building blocks include the PowerEdge FD332, a half-width storage block that provides up to 16 direct-attached small form factor (SFF) storage devices, enabling or up to 48 SFF storage devices in a 2U FX2 chassis, the PowerEdge FC430, a quarter-width, half-height server block that has the ability to host applications in smaller, physically discrete servers to minimise the risk of system failures, and the previously-described PowerEdge FC830.

Dell’s full four-socket server portfolio will be sold direct and via channel partners. Additional information and availability will be shared when the future Intel Xeon processor E7-8800/4800 v3 and E5-4600 v3 product families are announced. The Dell PowerEdge FC430 and FD332 are available in Singapore today, while the PowerEdge FC830 will be available in June 2015. 

Need the big picture? Read the TechTrade Asia blog posts about the rest of the Dell Solutions Tour:

Dell sees synergy with Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative
Dell’s new storage portfolio
It’s all about software: Dell
Networking for data centres goes future-ready


¹ According to the IDC Q4 2014 Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker 
² According to Dataquest Q2 1995 data

³ According to the IDC Q4 2014 Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker

⁴ According to the IDC Q4 2014 Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker; excludes Dell from industry calculations
⁵ Based on performance numbers from the Storage Networking Industry Association in August 2014, using Intel S3700 SATA SSD and Express Flash results.
⁶ Based on preliminary results from the Dell PowerEdge R930 Oracle Acceleration Study by Principled Technologies, April 2015 commissioned by Dell. Going from an HDD configuration to a mix of HDD+SSD+SanDisk DAS cache yields a 9x performance improvement. Going from an SDD configuration to a mix of HDD+SSD+SanDisk DAS cache yields a 23% price reduction. Pricing for a 1.2TB 10K SAS drive was used in place of the 900GB that was tested on, as the 900GB is not available for purchase with the 13G PowerEdge.
⁷ Based on a September 2014 Principled Technologies report commissioned by Dell, Simplifying systems management with Dell OpenManage on 13G Dell PowerEdge servers. Time savings calculation based on one server. 

⁸ Forrester Research, Inc., Quick Take: Dell’s FX Architecture Holds PromiseTo Power Modern Services, Rich Fichera, Glen O’Donnell, Andrew Hewitt, Nov 4, 2014