Note from Lionel: This blog is one of a 12-part series, “12 blogs for the Dell PowerEdge 12th Generation.” For more in the series, please check here, or click on the 12 blogs tag here.
Part III—Four innovation areas that deliver results faster
Today, we launch our latest and greatest generation of Dell PowerEdge servers with exciting innovations to help you achieve more. Our technology design strategy is grounded in listening to customers to create products that meet their needs. In fact, we had more than 7,700 customer interactions worldwide to get input on the features you need to power your business. The result is a portfolio of systems that help answer the biggest challenges IT faces.
For Part III on my series of the 12 most important things you need to know about the 12th generation (you can read Part I here and Part II here), I wanted to focus on the servers themselves. Here are the four most important areas of innovation to help you achieve results faster:
1. Customers can now streamline and automate operational tasks
We are introducing our second generation of embedded intelligence with Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC7) with Lifecycle Controller 2.0 to simplify the lifecycle of deploying, updating, monitoring, and maintaining PowerEdge servers. This technology extends capabilities to streamline and automate operational tasks to an install base of more than 3.5 million servers. Agent-free monitoring of network, storage, and add-in adapters across the lifecycle delivers real results for your IT factory helps save $2.6M (U.S. dollars) annually in maintenance costs and 43 days a year of administrative time.
2. Maximize efficiency to get the most out of your IT infrastructure
Our PowerEdge 12th generation servers help you get optimal energy efficiency and maximize virtualization density:
- Fresh Air Initiative: Dell engineered server, storage, and networking products to operate at to 45◦ C (113 ◦ F) – allowing data centers to save substantially on cooling costs. Operating chiller-less with our Fresh Air Initiative allows you to realize more than $100K of operational savings per megawatt of IT per year and eliminate capital expenditures of approximately $3M per megawatt of IT.
- Energy Smart Servers: PowerEdge 12th generation R720 and T620 servers are so efficient, you can cool your server with the same power needed for a nightlight! Every component is optimized for the most efficient operation to deliver significant savings — up to $2.15 million for an enterprise data center annually.
- OpenManage Power Center: now you can control power at the server, rack, row or room level. We’ve built OpenManage Power Center on top of Intel Node Manager, a standards-based server management engine for accurate monitoring and policy based power management. It provides fast power capping at the millisecond level to proactively prevent outages.
- No compromise virtualization: With powerful processors, large memory footprints and big I/O pipes, the PowerEdge R620 delivers 300% more Virtual Machines in the same physical space.
- Investment Protection: Our customers are on different paths and timelines to 10GbE as well as converged I/O, and the available choices and capabilities change rapidly. To provide choice of vendor, bandwidth and interconnect technology we are introducing the new Select
- Network Adapters which lets you choose the right network fabric without using up a valuable PCI slot.
3. Turn data into insights for faster results
In addition to the massive performance gains provided by the new Intel Xeon Processor E5-2600 product family, Dell PowerEdge servers power business applications more effectively with several new innovations:
- Express Flash: To dramatically reduce query times, we are introducing the industry’s first front accessible, hot swappable PCIe solid state disks to achieve an increase of up to 18 more Microsoft SQL Server transactions per second.
- CacheCade: The CacheCade data accelerator caches the most frequently accessed data and stores it on solid state disk drives. The result is an improvement of more than 3 times more transactions per second with 55% faster response time on Microsoft SQL Server.
- Scalable Storage: Certain workloads, like Microsoft Exchange Server, perform better using internal storage. Our new PowerEdge R720xd has what it takes, with up to 24 internal hard drives, to give you the ability to support three times the number of Exchange 2010 mailboxes and process twice the number of messages per day.
4. Ensure business continuity
Dell is committed to providing secure, continual access to the IT services that power your business. New reliability, availability, serviceability and security features keep your data center running with maximum uptime.
- Redundant storage: Your data is protected against accidental loss with best-in-class RAID options, and industry leading backup solutions.
- Fail-safe virtualization: PowerEdge 12th generation server technology helps you rebuild and recover from embedded hypervisor failure up to five times faster than non-Dell systems and with zero uncontrolled downtime, as well as failsafe virtualization with redundant hypervisors.
- Reliable memory: Reduce the risk of future uncorrectable memory errors. Denser, higher capacity, higher frequency memory is more sensitive – and increases the potential for errors. But not all errors necessitate replacing a DIMM. Dell Memory Page Retire – currently available for VMware and Windows – isolates a single-bit memory error and de-commissions that section of memory and then alerts the operating system not to use this page of memory.
- Digitally signed firmware: provides protection from intrusion with signed firmware updates to prevent unknowingly introducing a virus during systems maintenance operations.
- iDRAC Credential vault: authenticate the integrity of updates using digitally signed firmware, safeguard access to passwords and certificates with, and protect access to data at rest with automatic encryption.
Our highest performing, most manageable, most innovative servers ever
We’re excited to introduce Dell PowerEdge 12th generation servers to you. These new innovations will help you maximize efficiency by streamlining and automating operations, achieve more by turning data into insights for faster results, and ensure business continuity with security, availability, and reliability features.