This year has been filled with outstanding accomplishments for PowerEdge servers. One of the most rewarding aspects of our year has been how the rest of the industry is clearly recognizing Dell’s leadership, innovation and prominence in Enterprise computing. As Michael mentioned in his post last month, we just marked the 18th anniversary of the birth of the PowerEdge line. We’ve had steady momentum since then. In 2001 we became the leading provider of x86-based servers in the US – today we are the #1 x86-based server provider not only in the US, but in APJ as well. And with this year’s 12th generation of servers, along with the successes we've been celebrating in the marketplace, we are collecting an incredible number of accolades for our products.
We built our 12th generation of servers with input from more than 7,700 customers in 17 countries. The result was a new line of servers designed with accelerated performance and expandability, and major innovations in system management. I’m especially pleased to look back and see that all of our servers have the enhancements customers asked for – features like Express Flash PCIe SSD drives, improved acoustics, advanced RAS redundancy features, and that’s on top of higher levels of power efficiency and greatly expanded memory capacity across the portfolio. Our 12th generation PowerEdge servers deliver 11 % greater performance versus HP Gen 8 servers using the same CPU/DRAM configuration, this year TBR ranked Dell #1 in customer satisfaction in x86-based servers, and in September, Gartner upgraded their Dell server rating from “positive” to “strong positive.”
IT professionals today are being asked to do more to enable business outcomes, which means they need to spend less time managing the lifecycle of the infrastructure. This is where our innovations in systems management helps them save time and money. Administrators can save $2.6 million (U.S. dollars) annually in maintenance costs and 43 days a year of administrative time with iDRAC with Lifecycle Controller.
Benefiting from the latest developments that enable truly agent free monitoring and management, Dell OpenManage Systems Management won the Community Choice gold award from Windows IT Pro for Best System Utility, declaring: “Dell OpenManage makes the impossible easy.” Our server systems management so outpaces the competition that the CEO of Peak Hosting recently commented, “anyone who doesn’t use iDRAC7 with Life Cycle Controller is setting fire to money.”
In September we launched the PowerEdge C8000 series with a truly a ground-breaking design that will no doubt create a new category of flexible scale-out solutions. The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) has chosen to use several thousand PowerEdge C8000 servers in its new supercomputer “Stampede,” creating the 7th fastest computer in the world and supporting petascale-level computational science, doing things like discovering new patient medications, forecasting weather, exploring for energy and designing safer automobiles and airplanes.
In blade servers, we shipped 50% more memory capacity in 2- and 4-socket platforms—two times the density of ANY other blade in market. We brought innovative products to market with products like the M420, the world’s first quarter height blade server, and the M820, a dense 4-socket offering that gives you 10 times more virtualization capacity than previous generations and twice the performance of the competition – in half the space!
We’re proud of the innovations and features that we’ve designed and built into our 12th generation servers, and pleased that third parties have also taken note of Dell’s leadership position in the server space.
It was an especially good year for the R720 rack server. When we launched, it received the top spot on CRNs all-time list and BYTE TI’s “Best Server 2012.” That’s not surprising, considering how its design emphasizes high density and feature flexibility that delivers great performance across a wide range of workloads. Earlier this month, the R720 topped the field for the VMmark benchmark – once again beating the competition in virtualization performance. And just this week, CRN named R720 its server Product of the Year!
Not to be outdone, the PowerEdge R720xd won CRN’s Tech Innovator award, where they pointed out, “This year's winner in the Server category shattered performance records of all that had come before. “
Rounding out the accolades, PC Pro (UK) recommended the PowerEdge R620 with a perfect 6 out of 6 rating, calling it “the classiest 1U rack server on the planet.” And the PowerEdge T620 tower server was named 2013 honoree by CES Innovations.
But even with all this success we aren’t resting on our laurels. We are already deep into the planning and development of the next set of products – meeting with lots of customers, listening closely to them, and developing solutions for tomorrow’s challenges. At Dell, we are constantly looking ahead to the next challenge, and we look forward to delivering on our customers’ challenges in the New Year.
Stay tuned. 