Dell has announced new products and solutions to help global customers on their paths toward software-defined (SDN) data centres by bridging the gap between traditional and new application requirements.
Dell is helping to address this continuum with future-ready IT solutions, including new converged infrastructure architecture, storage solutions, and workload-specific appliances to help customers transform their data centres, capture cost savings, and ensure their businesses are competitive.
“Dell is placing customers first and delivering IT solutions which allow them to transform and future-proof their data centres without having to sacrifice the past,” says Marius Haas, chief commercial officer and president of enterprise solutions group, Dell.
“The new solutions announced today showcase Dell’s commitment to helping customers prepare for a software-defined data centre and truly allow them to optimise their environments to meet specific workload needs.”
Dell’s new future-ready IT solutions include the new Dell PowerEdge FX converged architecture that provides optimal modularity and scalability; a new Dell Storage SC4020 Entry-Level All-Flash configuration that offers compelling features and performance in an all-flash storage array for £15 000/€20 000; the new Dell Storage PS4210 Series for substantially improved application performance and connectivity options for small and mid-size deployments; and, the Dell XC Series of Web-scale Converged Appliances for integrated compute and enterprise storage.
Forces like cloud computing, mobility, big data, the Internet of things and software-defined IT make new IT application and workload types increasingly relevant to companies typically operating traditional IT processes, and underscore the need for IT solutions that optimise the differences with traditional and new applications. Dell also has engineered new technology to address the requirements of both traditional and new IT application processes.
“Despite claims to the contrary, mostly by vendors of proprietary servers, Dell’s new FX architecture clearly shows that x86 system innovation is alive and well,” says Charles King, Dell watcher and principal analyst, Pund-IT. “The company’s efforts also prove how being a disruptive force doesn’t require ‘thinking outside of the box’. In the case of the FX architecture, Dell has succeeded by rethinking the box itself.”
Today’s data centre is evolving and businesses are facing pressures to support existing application requirements while using IT in new and exciting ways – all within financial constraints. Typically customers must choose between a variety of system architectures, including best-of-breed hardware and current converged infrastructure as the base of their data centre operations.
The next-generation Dell PowerEdge FX architecture is Dell’s revolutionary approach to converged infrastructure with one common modular and scalable platform with servers storage and networking integrated to help customers better manage, scale and budget for infrastructure to meet business needs.
“In the past, as our VDI environment grew, my team was forced to make forklift upgrades of our shared storage systems to keep up with demand,” says Kyle Stewart, technology manager, Overlake Hospital. “With the Dell PowerEdge FX converged architecture, we now have a platform that scales linearly and significantly reduces the impact of an outage.”
The next-generation PowerEdge FX architecture is a 2U enclosure with six new PowerEdge server, storage and network IOA sleds built specifically to fit into the FX2 chassis and support varying workloads. Designed with integrated management capabilities, the FX architecture enables customers to easily configure, manage and add capacity to complete workload-specific blocks of IT resources.
This converged infrastructure approach affords efficiencies of shared power, I/O and management, integrated switching, and unsurpassed overall density capabilities at up to 40 2-socket servers in 10U. Building on Dell’s recent PowerEdge 13th generation server portfolio announcement, the next-generation PowerEdge FX2 also includes advanced systems management capabilities to reduce operational complexity and simplify data centre management.
Dell, first to introduce all-flash enterprise arrays for the price of traditional HDD solutions, today announced a new Dell Storage SC Series all-flash array configuration for £15 000/€20 000, making it one of the industry’s lowest-priced all-flash enterprise arrays. Offering a more economical starting point for flash performance to support demanding applications, the Dell Storage SC4020 Entry-Level All-Flash configuration offers substantial performance improvement over spinning disk solutions.
Customers seeking even greater performance can seamlessly expand to create a Flash-Optimised Solution with Dell’s best-in-class, intelligent data placement software to address customers’ future growth and performance needs. Both Dell SC4020 Entry-Level All-Flash and Flash-Optimised Solutions offer all-flash storage with the added benefit of further optimising costs by easily adding one or more tiers of spinning disk to the same array.
For the second consecutive year, Dell has been selected as the top choice for deploying enterprise flash/SSDs according to an October 2014 SSG-NOW independent survey of more than 300 global IT leaders.
Dell today announced the Dell Storage PS4210 Series enterprise storage arrays that bring improved performance and advanced connectivity options for entry-level primary storage and critical workloads.
This marks the introduction of a hybrid (flash and HDD) model to Dell’s entry-level PS Series portfolio, which is ideal for, small-to-medium virtualised data centres and remote offices. The PS4210 arrays are designed to be fully compatible and interoperable with all previous Dell EqualLogic PS Series arrays, which has helped make Dell the top iSCSI array sales vendor worldwide with these easy-to-use, scale-out solutions.
Dell’s latest 10GbE iSCSI arrays offer enterprise capabilities in five models that boast a more powerful controller with double the cache memory, twice the number of ports, and up to six times performance improvement with new hybrid arrays compared to previous generation arrays.
According to a 2014 ESG lab report, over a five-year period, Dell PS Series has the lowest TCO for small and large sized storage configurations – costing up to 58% less – when compared with other leading IT storage vendors.
Dell also announced worldwide availability of the Dell XC Series of Web-scale Converged Appliances, which integrates compute, storage and hypervisor resources into a single offering. The XC Series appliances, powered by Nutanix software, benefit customers with an integrated IT approach that offers enterprise-class storage for virtualised server and VDI environments with simple deployment, management and scale as needed.
The new appliances are available in five models designed to support different workloads.
With the XC Series, customers can manage their virtual environments at a VM level, making the appliances particularly ideal for virtual desktop infrastructure, high performance server virtualisation, and data centres with multiple hypervisors deployed. The XC Series joins Dell’s broad portfolio of software-defined storage and hyper-converged offerings for virtualisation customers.
Dell, Brocade, and Intel announced plans to deliver NFV-based solutions to virtualise and accelerate enterprise service delivery at the carrier edge. The solutions leverage Dell’s newly-introduced NFV platform powered by the Intel Open Network Platform for servers architecture and the Intel Data Plane Developer Kit combined with the Brocade Vyatta vRouter software to virtualise existing customer edge and provider edge networking functions.
Based on open software and industry-standard server infrastructure, Dell, Brocade and Intel are collaborating to help telecommunications service providers improve capital and operational cost structures for service delivery and to enable quicker, simpler service innovation and creation. Now NFV developers can easily use the latest technologies to evaluate and develop commercial solutions.